Based on my experiences with PC's that I've purchased, my best advice to you would be suicide.

Buy an Apple. They are so much more efficient and so less annoying. And I'm certainly not an Apple-lifer. In fact, I still use a PC, but my wife has an Apple, and its features and user-friendliness never ceases to surprise me. It takes awhile to get used to some of the basic features on an Apple b/c it is unlike a PC in some ways, but once you do, you'll be happy.

"DUDE! You're getting a Dell?"

My brother the computer guru always tells me to get the most memory you can afford, along with the fastest processer you can afford. Since I have not bought a computer since October 2000 (and I bought a PC clone at that time), I may be in the same boat before too long, but that was what I got when I bought mine at a computer show, and it's still alive and kicking. Good luck!!

I'm guessing this may become a broken record on this post, but seriously, I would advise that you at least go in to look at a Mac. I switched when I left for college two years ago, and have never looked back. Now more than ever, with the ability to install Windows on your machine for any application that aren't available for Macs, there is no excuse not to make the switch.

My experience is somewhat the opposite of lawyerchik's...I almost wish I had saved a few hundred dollars when I bought this one, because it looks like I'm about to wind up on a 3 year replacement schedule for a while. If I'm going to wind up replacing it anyway, then i might as well save a bit when i buy.

I keep getting tempted by macs, but I'm just not sure...I know so much about how to make things run on Windows that fixing the problems is basically just an instinct at this point. I don't know if/when I'll make that jump.

On Dell's...I currently have one. Their service has been decent while the thing was under warranty, but the product itself wasn't that great. I've had problems with the motherboard for quite a while, and I've blown through 3 of their power cables thus far.

Oh, and the CD drive on mine has also almost completely crapped out, and it never did a good job of playing DVD's anyway.

I doubt you'll find very many CD Drives that play DVDs well. :)

In any case, no matter what brand you buy, you'll find people who have had problems and people who haven't, so don't worry about the particular brand too much. The only general rule of thumb is that you get, to an extent what you pay for; nicer stuff will probably hold up better.

My personal opinion, though, would be this: if all you're doing is home-office type stuff (i.e., you don't want to run new games, Photoshop, etc), then just buy something cheap (i.e., $400 or less) and replace it in a couple years if you need to. If you don't need 2 gigs of RAM and a dual core processor (and those sure aren't required for Microsoft Office!), then there's absolutely no point in dropping a ton of money for such fripperies.

I think in both cases that I've purchased a PC, I've paid a fair amount more than I should have. I sure haven't gone on the cheap. And both of them have been disasters, although the previous one (Gateway) more so. So I don't know at all that there's any correlation between how much you spend and how well your system works.

And it is a DVD/CDR drive. It's just been real crappy with DVD's, to the point that I don't even try playing them in it.

I just replaced my six-year-old Pentium 3 a couple weeks ago. I got a Dell Dimension E510. Honestly, my favorite part of the new system is the 19" digital flatscreen I got with it. Oh, and get at least 1GB of RAM. More is better if you're doing anything multimedia intensive like Photoshop or video editing, but 1GB will suffice for most people especially if you're just jumping ship from a P3.

Honestly, everybody that's saying buy an Apple... do it if you've got the money. I stuck with a Dell PC because it cost me about $500 or $600 less than getting a comparable Apple system like a Mac Mini. Yeah, I'm not getting the beauty of OS X, but the machine I've got is fast, does everything I need, and Windows runs a fair amount of decent open source software and anything else you need.

I buy computers for my office but build my own for home. Because they're cheap my boss likes buying Dell. My complaints about Dell are primarily about their terrible tech support. When anyone who isn't a large corporate user calls Dell they are transferred into a crap shoot as to whether or not the person in India who answers the phone has an excellent or only good mastery of English. Frankly they pretty much follow a script that can result in repeating yourself over and over if you have to call multiple times. If you know enough to where the script needs to be bypassed you have to be firm to the point of rudeness to get around it. I had to do that in helping out a co-worker. I basically told the "support" person to be quiet and listen to someone who knows more about computers than they do because I had already examined her computer and there was no doubt that her DVD drive had died. That having been said, if you really are trying to watch your pennies Dell not only has good prices for new systems but also has an outlet store on their web site.

On the other hand while I work exclusively with PCs now I do have some experience with older Macs, have friends who use them and have checked out the current systems and admire them tremendously. If I can ever come up with a good enough excuse to justify picking up a Mac mini to hook up to my KVM switch I'd do it.

I second (third, fourth?) the Apple suggestion. Intel Macs can boot both Windows and OS X, they're fast enough for everything out there now and then some, and Apple's support is pretty decent. They're not that much more expensive than similarly powered PCs anymore, and I've come to believe that you really do get what you pay for where macs are concerned.

You know, I haven't used an Apple since 1987, but everybody talks about how great they are. I had an acquaintance who did a lot of video editing - he was kind of a weird guy who would go on vacation and take a video camera and actually interview total strangers about how they liked wherever it was he had travelled (!).

He did all of his editing and video work on an Apple, though, and the quality was awesome.

I bought a DVD burner for my system last year or the year before and had it installed at Computer Builders Warehouse - they installed the drive, did the software installation, too (Nero), and they walked me through how to run it. I like them better than anyone else I've ever talked to about computers (except my brother), and I've never had to call any tech support service for anything because the CBW guys fix whatever I've managed to do to my system.

Depending on where you work, you might want to check with your employer's IT people - sometimes, they can get you better deals buying through their department than you could get on your own.....

lawyerchik1,

great points all around. I'd also point out that if you go with a PC, another option is to build it piecemeal, using a great components website like newegg.com (nothing better on the web, imo... great prices, very quick delivery, and I'd comment on the service but I've yet to have a problem with an order).

Even if you don't want to do it yourself, there are scores of people who enjoy that sort of thing (I'm one of them; all of my PCs have been self-built) enough that they'll offer to do it for others as well.

Part of the reason for this is a love of quality-control. When you order a Dell or HP or whatever, you have little control over the processor, RAM quality, and even most options are limited; you get no control over motherboard manufacturer or type and they often design computers to limit your upgrading options so as to make you buy a new computer rather than improving the old one. Custom computers can get you (generally speaking) better parts for the same or less than the major players. The only downside is that service options can be more limited, and you can only warranty individual parts.

Good advice, everyone. Despite the very reasonable things said about Macs, I tend to find myself in the same boat as Balta--I have a lot of experience making things work on PCs, so I'm a little hesitant to make the jump. (If I were going to do a lot of photo/video editing, it might be a different situation.)

Anyone have an opinion on HP's? Three years ago I'd have told anyone to buy their printers but stay away from their PCs. But now it looks like they've overhauled their product line and they're at least comparable to Dell. (I like the fact that they have Firewire ports as a standard option on many of their models--although USB 2.0 still seems to be far and away the leading format for peripherals.)

If HP's desktop machines are as good as their current generation laptops go for it. My company "loans" my skills out to our attorney. I've had to help him with software configuration issues on his HP laptop and it is one nice machine. I noticed that there's been at least one good review of Gateway's latest PC that's oriented towards gaming. A Gateways is who I bought from the only time I bought a commercial desktop computer many years ago.

Yesterday I started speculating on whether or not there'd be a market for a new way for an individual to offer these services. I was thinking of telling the people who've asked me if I'd help them that I would charge them $300 plus the cost of the components to build them a system that we'd discuss and determine what they wanted and/or needed.