On my first HP laptop, both screen hinges broke after the warranty ran out. They used pot metal in the hinges, so it seems.

My new HP laptop has even more hinges to break. HP HDX, with a 1900somethingx1200something resolution HD wide screen that's 20". Sometimes you just have to get the rediculous product. It would have cost $2400, but there were many rebates on it, down to $1600. This picture puts the laptop in perspective, the "laptop" also weighs about 16 pounds with dual harddrives.

__________________
1980 240d
1999 SL500

I was thinking of a laptop because then I could bring it with me during my drill weekends and also when I deploy again. I knew they cost more for the capability you got, but I didn't think they were that fragile. Maybe I should get another desktop for now and buy a cheap laptop to take with me right before I go on my next deployment.

__________________
Whoever said there's nothing more expensive than a cheap Mercedes never had a cheap Jaguar.

83 300D Turbo with manual conversion, early W126 vented front rotors and H4 headlights 401,xxx miles
08 Suzuki GSX-R600 M4 Slip-on 26,xxx miles
88 Jaguar XJS V12 94,xxx miles. Work in progress.
99 Mazda Miata 183,xxx miles.

If you're taking it to drill and the field, consider a Panasonic Toughbook. I work for the Guard and we have sent hundreds of the Toughbooks to the desert with good results.

__________________
99 ML320
94 SL600
92 SL500
95 E320 Cabriolet
87 560SEC
86 300SDL Grease Car
80 380SLC Euro

13 Fiat Abarth
02 Maserati Spyder Cambiocorsa
00 BMW Z3
90 Rolls Royce Silver Spur
80 Ferrari 308 GTSI
88 Jaguar XJS12 H&E Edition
99 Land Rover Discovery

I'll third it; better yet - get an imac, we currently have four here in the office and have used macs since '84. A few bucks more initially but I have never (I mean never as in not one time) had a mac "crash", "lockup" OR..... And this is the primary reason for having macs, I have never spent a dime on IT support/repair. The one stinking windows machine that we have to have, for the state form programs that won't run on a mac, costs me $500-$1500 a year to maintain, and is only used 6-10 hours a week. The macs are used 8+ hours a day, every day and simply do what they are made to do, year after year.

Jim

__________________
2005 C240 4matic wagon (daily driver)
87 190D - 225K (on loan)
85 190D - 312K (on loan)
2011 Subaru Legacy AWD (Wife's)

Don't buy a mac, they suck, and they're not reliable. Also, do not buy a laptop, they also break, I guarantee it. If you want the best economy, build the pc yourself from quality parts and you will get the most performance per dollar and the longest lasting system.

I don't understand what all this is about the Mac OS being so "reliable" I've known several people who had it die on them (crashing), locking up and having boot errors, hard drive failures, display failures. The list goes on. Mac = expensive crap in a pretty case

Windows XP is extremely reliable. Some of my systems I have doing processing have been up nearly a year without issue. As of right now, the last time I rebooted my system was 18.9 days ago, and its running fine. The only reason I did was because of an update. I can't even remember the last time I had to restart or had an XP system crash on me. If XP crashes its usually a hardware fault, not a software fault.

__________________
-diesel is not just a fuel, its a way of life-
'15 GLK250 Bluetec 118k - mine - (OC-123,800)
'17 Metris(VITO!) - 37k - wifes (OC-41k)
'09 Sprinter 3500 Winnebago View - 62k (OC - 67k)
'13 ML350 Bluetec - 95k - dad's (OC-98k)
'01 SL500 - 103k(km) - dad's (OC-110,000km)
'16 E400 4matic Sedan - 148k - Brothers (OC-155k)

If he's going to take it to drill and deployment, he will have to have a windows box. I know they will let you take a laptop on deployment, but not a desktop and monitor.

__________________
99 ML320
94 SL600
92 SL500
95 E320 Cabriolet
87 560SEC
86 300SDL Grease Car
80 380SLC Euro

13 Fiat Abarth
02 Maserati Spyder Cambiocorsa
00 BMW Z3
90 Rolls Royce Silver Spur
80 Ferrari 308 GTSI
88 Jaguar XJS12 H&E Edition
99 Land Rover Discovery

The old cpmputer's power supply gave up on Thursday evening. I went computer shopping today and also have a shop working up a quote for a custom build. These things have gotten cheaper since I last was on the market. I'm going with a desktop for now and will snag a cheap laptop in a year or so when I'm getting ready to deploy again.

I'm thinking 3GB of RAM, and a 300 or so gig hard drive, XP, and a DVD burner. Not sure what processor to get.

__________________
Whoever said there's nothing more expensive than a cheap Mercedes never had a cheap Jaguar.

83 300D Turbo with manual conversion, early W126 vented front rotors and H4 headlights 401,xxx miles
08 Suzuki GSX-R600 M4 Slip-on 26,xxx miles
88 Jaguar XJS V12 94,xxx miles. Work in progress.
99 Mazda Miata 183,xxx miles.

thats more or less a portable desktop.

Thats weak, you can do better. You can get a 1 TERA BYTE hard drive right now for just over $100!!! If using a 32bit OS 3 gigs of ram will surely be plenty. DVD burners sell right now for about $19-39 depending on model/brand. I'd go with a very fast dual core AMD X2 CPU if you don't need to do advanced things (like video rendering etc...). They are cheaper and better. Intel is an evil empire.

I just built my brother a wicked fast system about a month ago for less than $500. AMD Phenom 9650 Quad Core, 4 gigs of Corsair XMS Ram (with cooling fan attachment!!!) Biostar T-force motherboard with the AMD chipset.....and he's running a 640 gig western digital hard drive...cost like $74!

He does graphic arts and digital animation, so he upgrades almost on a yearly basis....works out well because we "retire" his older parts to replace the innards of other aging pc's in my family's fleet. This time it went to my wife's parents PC....now they're running an Athlon64 X2 5200+

His system went from taking 23 mins to render a given file, to just under SIX minutes on the same file. Astonishing. For the price....I just can't believe the power. Its critical because each year the software he uses gets more complex and the renders get bigger and slower....his new setup can make a formerly 1 hour+ wait into a 15 minutes or less wait. Plus it has the resources to allow him to still do some work while its doing the rendering with only a minor performance hit. The old system choked on that.

I personally am running an AMD Opteron 170 dual core (server CPU) 1.5 gigs of ram....9700Pro graphics....and a 74 gig 10,000rpm Raptor Hard drive. (I want speed over size...I can put in a second larger drive for storage needs...)

Its quite fast. Server CPU's are awesome.

__________________
-diesel is not just a fuel, its a way of life-
'15 GLK250 Bluetec 118k - mine - (OC-123,800)
'17 Metris(VITO!) - 37k - wifes (OC-41k)
'09 Sprinter 3500 Winnebago View - 62k (OC - 67k)
'13 ML350 Bluetec - 95k - dad's (OC-98k)
'01 SL500 - 103k(km) - dad's (OC-110,000km)
'16 E400 4matic Sedan - 148k - Brothers (OC-155k)

I tried to load some pictures on my PC last night and got a low disc space warning. Turns out I only had about 300mb of space left. Hard drive is only 20 gigs.
I had a 160 gig hard drive that I had laying around that I used on my xbox and put that in the pc. Formatted the drive, all went well.

What I want to do now is move the OS over to the 160g drive and use the 20g drive for storage, pictures and music mostly.
What would be the best way to do that?

Danny

__________________
1984 300SD Turbo Diesel 150,000 miles

OBK member #23

(\__/)
(='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help him gain world domination

Do yourself a favor and get 4GB of RAM and Windows 7 x64. It's time to come out of the stone age, Windows XP is almost a decade old now. If you want value for money go for AMD. AMD's cheaper processors (under 200 bucks) tend to be better than Intel's, and Intel's high end stuff tends to best AMD's. So if you want raw power go for Intel setup. Check out the charts at tomshardware.com

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1985 CA 300D Turbo , 213K mi

Depends what you want/need; I only use macs because I prefer the OS and they make decent hardware. If you primarily care about cost, buy a PC and put up with using windows. I'm not a big fan of the white plastic MacBooks (or any plastic computer), for a little more you can get a 13 inch MacBook Pro (starting around $1400, I think).

Seagate Disk Wizard. Just used it yesterday.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

__________________
99 ML320
94 SL600
92 SL500
95 E320 Cabriolet
87 560SEC
86 300SDL Grease Car
80 380SLC Euro

13 Fiat Abarth
02 Maserati Spyder Cambiocorsa
00 BMW Z3
90 Rolls Royce Silver Spur
80 Ferrari 308 GTSI
88 Jaguar XJS12 H&E Edition
99 Land Rover Discovery

Thanks, I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm not interested in buying a computer or upgrading. Stone age or not. The computer I have suits me just fine the way it is. Anything else would be a waste of money.

Danny

__________________
1984 300SD Turbo Diesel 150,000 miles

OBK member #23

(\__/)
(='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help him gain world domination

Anyone else notice how old this thread is? . I built my rig about 3-4 years ago and spent $3000. I JUST had to buy more ram this weekend in order to run some of the more complex music composition software packages that I have. It is still running strong, AMD 4200+ dual core. I did upgrade the vid card to an ATI Radeon (doesn't hold a candle to the Nvidia I had in it prior though) and added a 640GB hard drive. I will probably be building another PC when I get the money, most likely 8-core. No need to skimp with video and audio editing.

Macs are fine if you don't have to pay for them. I would never spend my own money on a Mac, they are simply too much for not enough.

__________________
TC
Current stable:
- 2004 Mazda RALLYWANKEL
- 2007 Saturn sky redline
- 2004 Explorer...under surgery.

Past: 135i, GTI, 300E, 300SD, 300SD, Stealth