I've been building PCs off and on since 1983. There was a time when it was closer to rocket science than day to day technology. Over the years it has gotten better, little by little.

Today I had a truly amazing experience (not that exciting unless you're a bit of a nerd, but nonetheless). I had built a Home Theater PC (HTPC) so we could watch TV off the Internet out of old pieces of machines we had laying around as spares. It's done yeoman duty for several years but was not up to the task of running Blu-Ray disks and couldn't stream Hulu at full speed. Not a biggie, but Fry's had some incredible deals on a new CPU, Motherboard and Video card to upgrade it.

I figured that best case I'd need to re-install Windows 7, but I was up for that.

Instead in 45 minutes my daughter and I ripped apart & rebuilt the whole machine, rebooted it off the existing hard drive, had it find all the drivers it needed (even before we plugged in the Ethernet) and were running a machine that was twice as fast within an hour!

The "motherboardectomy" is still not something I'd recommend for the faint of heart as it involves lots of strange little cables and quite a few screws, but the resilience of the system is a testament to how far both PC architecture and Windows have come.

Nice when something works out!

--David

"I love it when a plan comes together" - Hannibal, The A-Team.

Mike--Whether or not Hannibal was the first to utter those words (sounds almost Pogo-esque) it's a great quote. My other favorite related quote is from The Who "The simple things you see are all complicated"--not that they intended it this way but it seems with technology many of the ocmplex things are a breeze and then others that appear simple take all the time and work!--David

Of course there always has to be some silliness. After all the work and installing Windows 7 Ultimate (the $300 flagship of Microsoft's product line) I popped a Blu-Ray disk in and had Windows Media Player say it knew nothing of the format and Windows Media Center explain I needed some software that would play Blu-Ray disks.

Easy enough, sure, but what were they thinking?! What else would a top of the line "Windows Media Center" be used for in 2010?--David

I agree with most of what David has said here. He's much smarter than I. But I'll inject a few comments:

1) Love Dell. If you buy the NDB (Next Day Business support) I've had great luck with that in the US. Canada, well, not so much.

2) The Dell Inspiron 1545 is a great 15" laptop, fast enough for most stuff, and you can stuff 4 gig of RAM in it. Comes with wireless b/g and you can get N as well if you need/want it. I wouldn't spend the extra $ for N unless you have an N network at home/office, personally.

3) Windows 7 64-bit is miles ahead of Vista. It's even as good as XP (there, I said it). I would strongly recommend Windows 7 Pro. Ultimate isn't really necessary.

4) Disk space. Buy as much as you can afford, but always carry a USB drive as secondary. They are small and inexpensive for the peace of mind they provide. The Simpletech series are bus powered and don't require a power cord, just two USB.

5) A decent USB hub can make up for the lack of USB ports. But you aren't going to find Firewire many places anymore. Not even on a Mac.

I do IT during the day. I'm a strong proponent of Dell. But don't get paid by them. Just like their stuff, for the most part.

Hope that helps.

Mike.

Another reason to buy Dell.

I like their E-Port Plus docking station. It has 2 DVI and 2 DisplayPort ports so you can run dual monitors without having to relegate one to a VGA port. Both the E-Port and E-Port Plus also use Dell's dedicated docking port that can be used with Latitude (not all) and Precision laptops. In my research, just about all other docking station solutions require you to connect from through a USB port and none have the dual display option. Of course, having a laptop with sufficient GPU power to drive the monitors is another matter (I have the Dell Precision M6400 with a dedicated Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M card.)

Harry--Good point about docks. They used to be all the rage but now it seems like most mfrs. have pretty much dumped them as their typical users must not worry about desktop flexibility too much. They're certainly nice if you really use your laptop as your primary machine when at a desk (I used to and had docks at both home and work for my Toshibas, but now have separate desktops so the laptop really only gets used away from the desk).--David

David,

I'm hoping/planning for a career change--or rather a return. Back in the 60's, I studied with Minor White at MIT for 3 years. After stints in ministry and programming, I want to reacquaint myself with my visual self. When I get situated, I'll be set up with the requisite workstations, Eizo monitors, and Epson 7900 printers. For now, however,I have to keep myself as portable as possible.

Harry