Upgrade or New

Posted by Darkelf

I am deciding wheter I should upgrade my computer or get a new one. I have a compaq presario and it is slow as hell. I also want to get a laptop. I hear bad stories about them though. Can someone help me.

Posted by Hyper

My grandmother has a Compaq Presario. 4GB harddrive. For the love of God, get a new computer.

Posted by Darkelf

Lol. Will do. Thank you. Now it is between a desktop and a laptop.

Posted by Velvet Nightmare

Quoting Darkelf: Lol. Will do. Thank you. Now it is between a desktop and a laptop.


That depends on what you are doing. If you plan on doing a lot of gaming, just go with a desktop unless you want to make a docking station of sorts with a moniter and all your cables on a desk somewhere. Laptops are wonderful for portiblity, and I love mine. I also have a 2 more desktops, and I love them too. But that is a hard decision. If you get a laptop, make sure that you get:

Greater than a 1.3GHz processor
At least 512MB of RAM
DVD-ROM/CD-RW Drive
Windows XP Home/Pro is fine
64MB or greater video card

But dont settle for anything less than that in a laptop. If you want a desktop, lemme know and I'll write the specs.
Posted by Alastor

If it's slow as hell, I recommend a new one. Simple as that.

As Velvet said, if you plan to do any gaming and you want a laptop, be sure you have somewhere where you can set up and be stationary for a while, and make sure that place has enough room to where you can hook up a mouse to the laptop and move it about freely without being too cramped. :)

Posted by Vampnagel P. Wingpire

Yes, definitely buy a new machine.

I, myself, own a laptop, and love it to death. It's still alright for gaming, and I enjoy taking it with me wherever I go (if the need arised). If you think you'll be wanting to use a computer away from home, get a laptop. If you don't really care, I suppose a desktop will be fine. Just be careful which brands etc. you choose. I'm actually thinking about getting a desktop, myself, although I think I'll wait a bit.

Posted by Trigger

[quote=Darkelf]I am deciding wheter I should upgrade my computer or get a new one.
As everyone else has said, it would depend on the usage for the machine in question. Take a look at the current hardware inside your machine and see if any of it is actually good enough to consider keeping. If there are, then take them out and consider buying a new machine with each individual compenents that you specify, rather than what a manufacturer machine specifies. Weigh out the costs for each option, whether it be to buy the machine already built or whether it be to buy each part that you need (if you opt for a desktop). If it's cheaper for you to build it yourself with your own selection of hardware, then great; not only will you keep some cash in your pocket, but you get the performance that YOU want, rather than possibly settling for second best.

Look at your current computer usage and ask, "can a laptop efficiently and effectively handle this kind of usability?"

Posted by Darkelf

So far, I like the laptop idea. I am looking online for one now. How much would a decent one cost. I really do not want to spend over 1500 dollars.

Posted by Velvet Nightmare

Quoting Darkelf: So far, I like the laptop idea. I am looking online for one now. How much would a decent one cost. I really do not want to spend over 1500 dollars.


You could get quite a nice one for 1500 dollars, acutally. Even an Alienware, although I find them to be a rip off, you can impress your friends. You could go with a Sentia:

http://alienware.com/product_detail_pages/Sentia/sentia_features.aspx?SysCode=PC-LT-SENTIA&SubCode=SKU-PERFORMANCE

Or perhaps (and what I would suggest doing) is getting a quality lappy from Newegg. You will get the same rig for quite a bit less.

http://www.newegg.com

Or you could always customise a Dell. I cutomized this one for you, hope that you dont need to cookie to see it:

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=i6000S1&s=dhs
Posted by gamma_sponge

If you go for a gaming laptop, look at one first in a store. A couple buds of mine bought gaming

Posted by Velvet Nightmare

Quoting gamma_sponge: For gamming though I would recommend a desktop, this way it can be upgraded when the new video cards come out or if you need more hard dive space.


All of this can be done on a laptop as well. Not as easily but done nonetheless.

Size is not really an issue for me. Weight is more than size, watch out for that.
Posted by f4phantom2500

i found an interesting article on thg:

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050504/index.html

Posted by Prince Redon

http://www.alienware.com/starwars_pages/awswaurora.aspx
[b]I like those!

Anyways, I personally would go with a laptop, only because I would end up carrying it to school and playing there in classes that they would let me and I got bored...Or you can get online and do whatever.

Now if I was buying it for the games...I would end up going with a desktop most likely, but I would rather make the small sacrafice and get a laptop.[/B]

Posted by Apathetic

You could try cyberpowersystem.com They have notebooks under 1500, with good graphics cards.

Posted by kinco

blah, I was just going to recommend CPS, lol. However, I just bought one from Gateway and the payments are reasonable. Just because I'm bored, here are my specs:

3.6Gig 660 Processor (64 bit)
1Gig DDR2 Ram
2x 250Gix HDD's
DVD/R-W
16xDVD/48xCD combo
NVIDIA 256MB 6800 Ultra
21" flat panel CRT monitor

and I had a final price tag of $2289, so don't underestimate the bigger companies.

Posted by Velvet Nightmare

Quoting kinco: blah, I was just going to recommend CPS, lol. However, I just bought one from Gateway and the payments are reasonable. Just because I'm bored, here are my specs:

3.6Gig 660 Processor (64 bit)
1Gig DDR2 Ram
2x 250Gix HDD's
DVD/R-W
16xDVD/48xCD combo
NVIDIA 256MB 6800 Ultra
21" flat panel CRT monitor

and I had a final price tag of $2289, so don't underestimate the bigger companies.


Gateway is NOT worth it. They have terrible customer service, i know from experiance. Also, you paid far to much for that computer. The processor alone should have only been in the neighborhood of $400, the RAM $80, HD's about $250, and CD drives at about $120, and the VCard at about $300. With the monitor, you could have easily built that yourself for about $1600.00.

Sorry, you got ripped off.
Posted by thelaststand

i have a laptop right now and mmm its pretty nice, but if your a hardcore gamer i would suggest a desktop, granted it is bigger but if you really need to take it somewhere its not that big of a deal, if you need something portable, u can find some good gaming laptops ones, but laptops are a pain to upgrade because if you try and do it yourself you could screw up your computer, and if you dont do it yourself you would end up spending even more money, so pretty if you just use your computer for gaming i would get a desktop, but if you have a day job or anything like that you would need 2 take notes i would get a laptop

Posted by Vaporeon

From someone who's upgraded a compaq, get a new one. Yeesh.... I swear its like they used a sledgehammer to cram all of the components in there.

Posted by wolfmaster

I would go with a desktop all around when it comes to gaming.

Just in case anybodys interested you could build one of alienware's $5000 comps for just a ittle over $1000 dollars if you build it yourself without the water coolent system...




For instance I am in the process of building this comp for $1200


3.2 mhz pentium 4hyper threading, dual proceeser (lga socket)

4 gigs of DDR2 Ram

Brand new ATI x800 Graphics card

120 gig Rapter Hard drive

two 48x dvd/cd/rw/ect drives

a flooppy drive

And ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe Socket T (LGA 775) Nvidia nForce 4 SLI ATX Intel Motherboard

All of these can be found at [url]www.newegg.com[/url]


Pretty sweet deal for around 1200 is'nt it?