Upgrade options. IT guys ?

[Gon Fishun]

Not going to steal your thread here LP, but I too am in the need to upgrade from an old Acer Aspire, with XP on it, about 8 years old and on its last legs.
Have been looking on Evilbay and there is quite a lot of desktop PC's in various sizes that look alright, and at a good price, etc etc.
Example.
AMD FX-4100 4-CORE Black Edition 3.6GHz CPU, Turbo Core 3.8GHz, Integrated NVIDIA GeForce GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR
Dual Channel 4GB RAM, 1TB / 1000GB SATA 3 7200rpm HDD, 24x Dual Layer DVD BURNER
10/100 LAN, 5.1 HD Audio, Bluetooth v2.0, Multi Card Reader.
Prices range from about $300 upwards.

Just read TT message with regards to Win XP on a sata drive. I have found XP to be very reliable, in never had one problem with it, and would like to keep using it along with MYOB.
What do you guys reckon about the Ebay PC's ?
Cheers.
Bob.

[Spin]

Has your XP disk got service pack 3
if not it will just blue screen you?

[Gon Fishun]

Has your XP disk got service pack 3
if not it will just blue screen you?

The Acer Aspire came with XP , SP2 and would not install SP3. But I had a major hardware crash 12 mths ago ( to lengthy to go into detail) but I ended buying the XP disc and now it has SP3.
Does this mean if I bought a new PC my XP program will install ?
Cheers.

[honda900]

I have had a bit of a squizz guys.........

Just need to make that decision.

Thing is, I don't look forward to swapping over all info from old to new.... particularly the Garmin stuff. ( Homeport and mapsource )


cheers LP

Phil,

dont try and move the software, reinstall it. both mapsource and homeport work on Win 7. Just backup and copy your data.

Regards
Honda.

[TheRealAndy]

I have a reasonable late model dell here with XP sp3 installed. You should be able to install XP on most new PC's. You have issues finding drivers for some of the higher performance hardware though.

I think dell will still sell you a PC with windows xp installed.

[honda900]

Just a note Phill, SATA is not supported with Win XP for the initial install. Lots of new motherboards are SATA only (some with and IDE degrade option in BIOS to get you through at half speed though). If you decide to keep your Win XP it is worth researching, I am going through the pain atm trying to get XP loaded to a SSD drive.

tunaticer,

Sata drivers were not released with Windows XP, integrating the drivers is very simple, during the DOS mode installation you are prompted to install additional disk drivers. use the manufacturer supplied disk at that point.

or create an customisted installation.

http://aps2.toshiba-tro.de/kb0/TSB85017Z0000R01.htm

Regards
Honda.

[honda900]

Phil,

While dell have proved to be reliable, there lower end laptops tend to under perform compared to other brands of the same specs (that is from experience).

All of you should also be aware that commercial support for Windows XP is finished from Microsoft so the production of drivers and updates for the O/S from manufacturers, such as printers and other peripheral drivers has ceased from a development perspective. So moving forward you will find it increasingly difficult to get anything to work with it.

Best advice I can offer is to make the switch to win7 (win 8 has been released but think twice about it, the interface is a dogs breakfast). Yes there will be some challenges that you need to overcome, however I have only seen a few applications that wont play well on the newer platform and as Andy alluded too there are ways and means to address them.

Regards
HOnda.

[lucee81]

Forget it all and go a Mac.

[TheRealAndy]

Forget it all and go a Mac.

I did that, biggest mistake of my life.

[lucee81]

I've always used Macs they have a purpose and a lot better for design etc but like windows it comes with its disadvantages.
Linux best of both worlds.

[Lucky_Phill]

OK ferets, I have done it.

Got a Dell. Inspirion.




details uummmm.... see link

http://www.jbhifi.com.au/computers/d...ook-sku-81803/

8gb ram, 750gb HD, AMD quad core thingie....... all too much...

OK,,, with a small haggle, got it for 729.00. Bought some anti-virus and a Telstra dongle thing for internet connection.

Sales guy seemed to know what he was talking about and answered all my questions.

I need a 4 port USB switch hub now for home accessories.

Set the laptop up and waiting on Telstra to activate the connection.

I will attempt to transfer documents etc over to new machine over the weekend..... good luck, I hear you say... and I'll need it.

WHY ? well, my old word processing system / software is Office.org generic Microsoft Office, so hopefully it will transfer to new set up ( genuine Microsoft office ) OK. ????

With me new mega RAM I also should be able to use Pinnicle for my video stuff as well.

Thanks guys..........


cheers Phill

[tunaticer]

Dell is what we use at work. Buy online, get delivered. Have a problem they come to you to fix it. So far we have had no failures. If you ring them you can haggle on price. Our main client also uses Dell, and they have thousands of them.

As for OS, win7 is by far the best OS on the market at the moment, its more stable than any of the others with far less problems. The only issue is that you may not be able to run a few older apps, but if you buy win7 professional, you can actually run a full blow copy of win xp under win 7.

Win XP does not have SATA drivers for install, hence can not get access to the hard drives for the installation if you run a SATA only motherboard, which most are these days. There is only two ways around this problem. Set your bios to run your SATA ports as IDE and run at less than half the speed capability of your machine or 2......strip your Win XP install disk to the hard drive, add the SATA drivers as a bootload item, then burn a new disk, then install your new copy to the hard drive using SATA.

I loaded Win XP last night to get my cad programs operable for this weekend and running at IDE speeds instead of SATA is woefully slow. Next week I will strip the XP to do it properly.

[TheRealAndy]

Win XP does not have SATA drivers for install, hence can not get access to the hard drives for the installation if you run a SATA only motherboard, which most are these days. There is only two ways around this problem. Set your bios to run your SATA ports as IDE and run at less than half the speed capability of your machine or 2......strip your Win XP install disk to the hard drive, add the SATA drivers as a bootload item, then burn a new disk, then install your new copy to the hard drive using SATA.

I loaded Win XP last night to get my cad programs operable for this weekend and running at IDE speeds instead of SATA is woefully slow. Next week I will strip the XP to do it properly.

If you are responding to the part of my post where I said you can run xp under win 7, its virtualised, so SATA or any other drive architecture is irrelevant.

[finga]

Does Casio still make computers?

[TheRealAndy]

Does Casio still make computers?

Kinda, they make the ones that you local shop uses to work out how much change they should give you!!