What is your deciding factor? sheer power branded or unbranded price good support and customer care from the manufacturer
most of my life I have built my own and replace my own components as and when required, then you have no-one else to blame when things go wrong. This also used to be a lot cheaper. Nowadays there is not any money to be saved by building your own if you are going for a top of the range system, however you do have the luxury of building it exactly how you want and put all your money into the important components. For a development machine your priority should be on: lots of fast memory (8GB is ideal), fast hard disks (SSD or hybrid), top of the range mobo with fastest ports and buses and built in hyper-v suppoer, 802.11n dualband wifi, fast cpu (quad core). Obviously graphics and sound and a super expensive case wont be that important to you, so you can go budget on these things or just use the ones that come with the mobo. I highly recommend Antec cases and PSU's. but the problem you face buying a branded machine is that you cannot go opening it up and replacing components if you want to keep your warranty. So if something fails then you need to send it back to the manufacturer. Sending your computer back sucks and u will often have to pay for that, so better to go with someone who does onsite support and repairs. Here are the vendors I have experience with. novatech Really good company, good service and support, will generally replace things without quibble, they seem to have have a good rep for this if you read reviews I have bought several cheap workstations from them that lasted for years, but I have personally never had to return anything. They do their own branded stuff now too. Dell Very good quality machines, with lots of neat little extras. All components are proprietary and you need to go through DELL to replace everything, they are all however high quality components. Their support and customer service seems to be hit and miss, when it is bad is is really bad, but when it is good it is awesome. I bought a new Dell XPS laptop, which is a fricking awesome laptop, it is more powerful than my desktop with a pretty decent 5.9 windows 7 performance rating. The pre-sales support was abysmal, I couldn't order on the site as something was broken, and spent weeks sending them emails and getting no response, people promised to call and didn't, their call centre is also based in India. So communication is a bit of a problem. However the after sales support has been good, I had a problem with my mobo beeping, an enginner came out to my office and replaced the mobo, free of charge. It did not fix the problem, so Dell repalced the whole laptop, again free of charge, and even sent me the new one first so I could copy across all my data and then picked up the faulty one at my convenience. Acer I have had an acer laptop, and the screen went orange and Acer wouldn't do anything about it. I know someone who works at acer who tells me they are awful, they have known problems with their system and happily ship them out with these issues and will do anything to avoid fixing or replacing and will generally try and charge the customer. HTH On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Matt Williams <mgw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > My HP desktop at work died last night. This morning we took the hard > drive out and put it into another box whose drive had died a couple > months ago. It worked at first, but after about 20 minutes it croaked > too. > > Anyway, I'll be shopping for a new desktop and just wondered what > brands people recommend these days. I'll probably stay away from HP > and plan to stay with a Windows machine. I run CF Developer, SQL > Server Mgt Studio, CF Builder, Adobe Creative Suite (primarily DW and > PS), MS Office, and various browsers and other tools. > > Dell? > Lenovo? > Asus (seems to be mostly gaming oriented)? > Acer? > Gateway? > Others? > > Thanks, > > -Matt > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:347276 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
