So, my home PC is toast -- I think that's the technical term -- and I need to start looking for a replacement.
Unfortunately, on a good day my computer knowledge extends to recognizing the "Power" button.
Fortunately, I'm pretty sure that 90% of our little community has forgotten more about computers since breakfast than I will ever know. So I'm turning to you for advice.
We are a non-techie family, so we don’t use our home computer for anything fancy (for example, no gaming or downloading of movies or the like). Just word processing, QuickBooks and run-of-the-mill Internet stuff (e-mail, Facebook, Googling stuff). Also, The Lovely and Talented stores a lot of digital photos on the hard-drive, but its pretty much pure storage. I don't expect that our needs are going to change in any important ways any time soon.
We just bought a new monitor and speakers, so we don’t need any peripherals (other than an external hard drive (which we may put off until later)).
All things considered, we’d probably like to spend under $500-$600 (but we’d also consider going higher if there’s a really good quality/reliability reason for doing so).
We just don’t know the first thing about what we should be looking for (in terms of manufacturers or features).
I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions anyone may have.
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I used to recommend Gateways because of their excellent customer service, but the company's been bought and sold so many times in the past few years that I can't do that anymore. For what you are saying you need it for, I'd go with a an ASUS laptop or desktop now. You can can a very decent one in your price range, and you can save money by not letting them talk you into things like purchasing virus protection. You can get excellent free protection by downloading AVG or AVAST (I've used AVG for over ten years with no real virus problems).
We've got two ASUS computers here, and we put them through the paces. They do a nice job.
Y'know, I had this same problem almost exactly a year ago: "Computers and Lightning". Give a read over there.
I've been mostly happy with the HP Pavilion I wound up buying. The only recent glitch was that my son bought an iPod and we had the devil of a time syncing it to that computer (but that's a long story I haven't told yet). Suffice to say, we couldn't make it work.
The other thing I would say is, I relied very much on reviews from C-Net's website, PC World's website and Consumer Reports. And yes, I second the recommendation to go to ninite.com and get all the useful freebies in one place. One of those freebies you must get is Belarc Advisor, which catalogues everything on your computer. Print it out and save it, and update it whenever you add something new; it's important and helpful information when you want to restore stuff on your machine.
I agree with Clark about checking at CNet and other resources. CNet is what lead me to the ASUS brand. I hadn't heard of it at the time either, but it gets very good reviews.
HP computers are very good too, but HP is moving out the PC market to focus on peripherals. They've already shut down the HP TouchPad, and they've mothballed their WebOS (Pat just picked up a TouchPad for a measly 100 bucks). I don't know how committed they're going to be in coming months to the PC lines.
Rich Lane said:
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