Ok so heres the deal. My comp right now is a Dell blah blah blah its 2 or 3 years old.  It runs games like AION and WAR and other PC games just fine, just not with all the high detail. I'm really ok with that... But I figure its time to upgrade..

So Dell is a company I trust and they have these gaming comps and I was looking at just their basic one since I'm sure it will fit my needs but just in case I'm gonna throw the stats out here (cause I have NO clue what they mean) and if you guys could tell me if the parts are good enough or if I should pay extra to upgrade?

- Intel Core 2 E8400 (6MB, 3.0 GHz, 1333 FSB)

- SLI Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTS 240, 2048MB (Video Card)

- 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 DIMMS ( I know this is my RAM but have no idea bout the rest)

- (Hard Drive) 500GB 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache

I know plenty of people will tell me to upgrade a bunch but to be realistic I just want a decently fast moving comp than what I already have, which is pretty fast enough as it is, and with better graphics. I've posted on here previously what my current comps stats are which is:

I have a Pentium 4 CPU 3.00 GHz

2.99 GHz, 2.00 GB of RAM

My video card is Radeon x600 256mb Hypermemory
 

So keep in my I'm not really tech savy at all and give it to me straight.

And on a side note. What do people do with their old comps nowadays?

I plan on possibly buying tomorrow and really have no clue about comps so please any help would be wonderful!

Hey, for starters how much is this dell gona set you back?

To answer your question with no fluff. I would recommended adding 1GB of RAM to that rig and go with it. For your needs and knowledge level, you should be fine.

Awsome I figured one more gig might be needed, thanks!

and this Dell would only be 800$ without adding the extra gig or ram

Ugh, SLI'ing 2 slow video cards is not worth it unless you already had 1 to begin. On a fresh system it's better to get the 1 faster card which is the same price as 2 slower SLI'd cards, that way later on you can add the 2nd SLI card when it's cheap and keep your system going for a while. Plus SLI doesn't always boost performance by much so the single card is safer.

Unfortunately I don't see a single card choice for the $800 base price XPS 630 you're looking at. The $1000 XPS 630 (dunno why they have 2 prices for the same PC) does have the option for a 4870, but $200 extra for a 4870 is ridiculous. So I don't really see the optimal solution for low price PC's there, if you must go with Dell I guess that's the best choice - the dual 4850 are a good upgrade in most games but those are the 512mb versions which don't handle 1920x1200 very well in some games. And at 1680x1050 you'd get playable framerates from either setup anyway.

Also with the DDR2 you will be able to pull the 2GB from your old PC and throw it in your new PC for 4gb total.

The GTX 240 is a 9800GT ($110) card btw so 2 of them would be $220, the same price as a 4890 or GTX275 or 4850x2 2gb (best buy actually).

Originally posted by noquarter

Ugh, SLI'ing 2 slow video cards is not worth it unless you already had 1 to begin. On a fresh system it's better to get the 1 faster card which is the same price as 2 slower SLI'd cards, that way later on you can add the 2nd SLI card when it's cheap and keep your system going for a while. Plus SLI doesn't always boost performance by much so the single card is safer.

Unfortunately I don't see a single card choice for the $800 base price XPS 630 you're looking at. The $1000 XPS 630 (dunno why they have 2 prices for the same PC) does have the option for a 4870, but $200 extra for a 4870 is ridiculous. So I don't really see the optimal solution for low price PC's there, if you must go with Dell I guess that's the best choice - the dual 4850 are a good upgrade in most games but those are the 512mb versions which don't handle 1920x1200 very well in some games. And at 1680x1050 you'd get playable framerates from either setup anyway.

Also with the DDR2 you will be able to pull the 2GB from your old PC and throw it in your new PC for 4gb total.

Well my older comp is Dell is it has never had a single problem and still plays new MMOs with graphics that are completely fine by me. I'm not really a graphics person.  Also I am not really understanding which things I should upgrade. I'll look back at the options to see which ones you pointed out here. Again, I'm not that good when it comes to understanding specifics.

Originally posted by dreamer05

- Intel Core 2 E8400 (6MB, 3.0 GHz, 1333 FSB)

This is a regular dual core processor, good enough for all games of today. I run a quad myself but as long as you don't use programs in the background there is really no use for that, at least not for us MMO players. Few games support more than 2 processors anyways. It is a good choice for anyone with limited budget :)

- SLI Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTS 240, 2048MB (Video Card)

Bad choice.  Running 2 cheap cards in SLI will not help much and MMOs don't support SLI anyways. A 260 GTX will perform a lot better to about the same price. The 240 GTX is a junk card like 9400 and 8400. Get a single 260 or a 280 instead.

- 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 DIMMS ( I know this is my RAM but have no idea bout the rest)

It is ok. 4 gig would be better of course and it doesn't cost that much more, consider that.

- (Hard Drive) 500GB 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache

Well, it will do plenty. The alternative would be buying a 80gb Intel X-25. It is a lot faster and completly silent because it works like a flash memory instead of a regular harddrive with a spinning disk. 80 gb can be somewhat small however if you use the computer to store movies and music on too but it will give a lower electricity bill. I use 4 X-25 myself raided together. But if you are unsure just go for the regular drive.

I have a Pentium 4 CPU 3.00 GHz

Wow, that was ok 5 years ago but today you need at least a 2.66 dual core. The P4 just is too slow for modern games.

2.00 GB of RAM

It still works. 4 is always better and ram is cheap but as long as your gfx card have enough ram youll do ok with just 2 gigs.

My video card is Radeon x600 256mb Hypermemory

*yuck* Sorry but that old card should have been retired a long time ago. 512 mb is minimum even for games a few years old (well, at least if you want them to be playable). I reccomend a 260 GTX, it have quite good punch for what it costs.

And on a side note. What do people do with their old comps nowadays?

Well, recycle it, give it to some kid or someone poor. Or put some more harddrives in it and use it in a network to store movies and music. Forget selling it, computers that old wont sell.

Good luck with it and send me a PM if you have any questions or need any help :)

Awsome thanks for all the help! And now my last question. Could I just get to 2gig ram on the new comp and take 2 out of my old comp to put in the new one? Or had that also changed too much?

And PS my comp still does really well with even the new mmo and games, although you're right its time to retire it.

Ok dont buy that dell. I have a way better deal for you. Its an Alienware, whihc is obvoiusly a high end brand that has recently been purchased by Dell. So you wont have to worry about quality or service. The total price is $979.00, and that includes:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.00GHz 6MB Cache 1333MHz FSB

1.8GB NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 260

2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz  - 2 x 1024MB

500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7,200RPM 16MB Cache

Now the only shortfall on this system is the ram, however if your current computer uses DDR2, then you can throw that right in. It will only take 2 seconds and even you will be able to do it. It was mentioned before that the 2 lower end video cards was not teh best option, and that is the truth. Since SLI is far from a perfect platform, in regards to scalability, a single more powerful card is the better option. The GTX 260 is a good midrange card that has been quite popular since release. I realise that this is slightly more than the previuos system, however it does fix the potential problem with the underpowered graphics cards, and leaves a wider room to upgrade in the future. Furthermore, teh quality of components used in this system will likely be much higher than in the lower end dell you had listed. If you are intrested in this system I'll send you the link and tell you how to configure it teh way i have it set up.

Originally posted by Lord_Elros

Ok dont buy that dell. I have a way better deal for you. Its an Alienware, whihc is obvoiusly a high end brand that has recently been purchased by Dell. So you wont have to worry about quality or service. The total price is $979.00, and that includes:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.00GHz 6MB Cache 1333MHz FSB

1.8GB NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 260

2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz  - 2 x 1024MB

500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7,200RPM 16MB Cache

Now the only shortfall on this system is the ram, however if your current computer uses DDR2, then you can throw that right in. It will only take 2 seconds and even you will be able to do it. It was mentioned before that the 2 lower end video cards was not teh best option, and that is the truth. Since SLI is far from a perfect platform, in regards to scalability, a single more powerful card is the better option. The GTX 260 is a good midrange card that has been quite popular since release. I realise that this is slightly more than the previuos system, however it does fix the potential problem with the underpowered graphics cards, and leaves a wider room to upgrade in the future. Furthermore, teh quality of components used in this system will likely be much higher than in the lower end dell you had listed. If you are intrested in this system I'll send you the link and tell you how to configure it teh way i have it set up.

Is that easy to buy? And how would I set it up to buy it?

Now really isn't the best time to buy a new computer, as so much good stuff will be released very soon.

For starters, I'd say don't get a Core 2 processor.  If you absolutely must buy right now, a Phenom II (from AMD) is better value for the money.  If you can wait slightly, Intel's Lynnfield line of processors (the replacement for Core 2 Quads) will release next week and give you vastly superior performance (even on a per core basis, before considering that 4 cores is better than 2) for about the same price.  Those will be available immediately, as stores already have them in stock and have for weeks, but just aren't allowed to sell them until Intel says so, as Intel doesn't want to cannibalize Core 2 sales without having enough of Lynnfield (to be branded as Core i5 and Core i7) to sell to everyone who wants one.

As for video cards, Nvidia apparently thinks about enough of their GTS 240 that they won't sell it at retail at all.  Apparently it's a rebranded card from two generations prior, and essentially identical cards can be bought at retail under other names (8800 GT, 9800 GT).  It's probably worth noting that ATI is releasing their next generation of cards next week as well, with lots of good stuff (DirectX 11 support, 40 nm node, GDDR5 memory, etc.).  It's unclear exactly what they'll release; some rumors say only their "Cypress" chip likely to be Radeon 5850/5870, which may be out of your price range, while other rumors are that they'll have their whole next line out and were only waiting on TSMC to get its 40 nm production process fixed.  It's also unclear when the cards will be available at retail, though we'll find out a lot more next week.

If you're getting a new computer, you should probably get one with DDR3 memory, which is a lot faster than DDR2 and nearly the same price.  The Core 2 architecture is old, though, and only recently have motherboards to have DDR3 have come out.   If you're getting Vista, then 2 GB of memory will not be enough for some games, as Vista wants a ton of memory.  4 GB should be plenty for quite some time to come.

Speaking of Vista, Microsoft is releasing Windows 7 next month.  Opinions differ on how good Windows 7 will be, but it's almost universally rated as better than Vista.  If you buy a computer with Vista now, you can get a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it releases, but wiping your hard drive to install Windows 7, reinstall everything, track down drivers, etc. is quite a hassle.  You can technically upgrade to Windows 7 without the full wipe, but that's not really the best idea.

For a hard drive, unless you think you'll need more than 500 GB (check how much space is used on your current hard drive for comparison), the only meaningful upgrade would be a solid state drive, which is probably out of your budget.  Dell won't sell you a good solid state drive, anyway--though they will sell you a bad one and charge you more than you could get a good one for elsewhere.  The short version here is that a solid state drive based on the Intel or Indilinx controller is good, the Samsung controller is mediocre, and the JMicron controller is worse-than-a-rotating-platter-hard-drive junk.  If a company won't tell you what they're selling, you can bet that it's junk.  The difference here is much larger than you might think:  an Intel or Indilinx based drive is literally thousands of times faster at 4 KB random writes than a JMicron one.

-----

If you really want someone to give it to you straight, though, my advice would be don't buy from Dell.  They used to be good, but not anymore.  Let me tell you about the computer I'm typing this on, which is a Dell bought in 2007.

When I got it, two drivers were installed wrong.  I know that the DVD driver was installed wrong because right out of the box, Windows said, that's not a valid driver so it has been disabled.  Dell would have seen this if they had turned the computer on before shipping it.  I went to the drive manufacturer's web site and it rather prominently said, if you bought a Dell, they screwed up, and here's the driver you need.  Apparently Dell did that to a lot of people and just hoped that customers wouldn't notice.

The other driver installed wrong was the video card.  Right after I got the computer, I tried to run a game that said, sorry, the game won't run because your video card drivers are too old.  A quick trip to the ATI web site to get the right driver fixed that, but it's still an inexcusable blunder on Dell's part.

A few months later, Windows decided that the copy that Dell had installed wasn't genuine.  It took a few hours of messing with it to finally get Windows to accept that Dell wasn't pirating the software.  That might have been Microsoft's fault rather than Dell's, I suppose.

A while later when I finally decided to try using the TV card, I found that Dell hadn't included software to run it.  I think they intended for me to use Windows Media Center, which can do quite a few things with a TV card, but taking an incoming signal and displaying it on the screen in real time (which is, after all, the entire point of a TV card) is not one of them.  I went to the card manufacturer's web site, and it said, here's the software for it--but oh by the way, it's not compatible with Vista.  And Dell had sold me this card in a Vista machine, which is inexcusable.

A few months later, the computer crashed, and when I tried to boot it, it wouldn't.  After about four hours of messing with it, I was able to bring up a DOS prompt and back up my data.  After another four hours, I finally got it to boot into safe mode, and shortly after that, it booted up just fine and seemed to be in proper working order.

Right around that time, the hard drive started randomly corrupting files.  I got Dell to replace the hard drive two weeks later (as it was still under warranty), and haven't had any problems with the replacement.  It's understandable that hard drives fail now and then, but it's still quite a bad thing to go wrong.

About two years after getting the computer, I thought it might be nice to upgrade it to something faster, most likely with a new processor and video card.  I looked into what it had and what I could upgrade it to.  I could have upgraded the processor from a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo to a Core 2 Quad with a much higher clock speed, which wouldn't be the recommended processor for a new machine, but would be a perfectly good upgrade for an old one.

For the video card, I was rather stuck, though.  Apparently Dell found a motherboard with no PCI Express slot (which has been the standard for video cards since about 2004) and used it to sell a gaming computer in 2007.  I could get a video card for the AGP slot, but just not a very good one.  It would entail paying $100 for a slower version of a $50 card that isn't really that fast (which is why it's a $50 card).  After everything else that is wrong with the computer, I'm rather afraid that such an upgrade would fry the power supply, too.

Recently the computer started blue screening with a cryptic IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error message and automatically rebooting when I'd try to boot it up.  Repeated reboots (to try to copy down the whole error message, as it reset the computer after only a couple of seconds) finally cleared up the problem after an hour or so, leaving me no idea of what the problem had been.

Also, the Dell mouse sometimes interprets a single click as being a double click.  That can be attributed to normal wear and tear, I guess, and was easily handled by replacing the mouse.

And that's just the things that went wrong with this one computer from Dell.  So basically, I'll never buy from Dell again.  And I want a new computer now, too, so I don't have to rely on this one.  At the moment, I'm waiting for Lynnfield processors, ATI Evergreen video cards, Windows 7, and solid state drives to get TRIM support, and the release of Windows 7 on October 22 will probably be the last of those.

Originally posted by dreamer05

Awsome thanks for all the help! And now my last question. Could I just get to 2gig ram on the new comp and take 2 out of my old comp to put in the new one? Or had that also changed too much?

 

And PS my comp still does really well with even the new mmo and games, although you're right its time to retire it.

Possibly, it depends if you have DDR or DDR 2 memorys in the old one. IT is most likely you have old DDR memorys and then you cant use them but it is not impossible that you bought a high end system with DDR2.

They don't have the same slots so you can see it if you just hold up the memory close to the slot, there is a pin in the slot that are in different positions depending on the type of memory you have (DDR,DDR2 or DDR3).

And most MMOs uses old gfx engines that wont support multicores and leave the most work to the processor instead of the GPU. That is however changing fast now since AoC released most new games will need newer GFX cards and preferably multicore.

But games like Wow and LOTRO are made to run on your computer so of course do they run fine, only EQ2 have updated itself from single core to multicore and let the GFX card take over many of the processors tasks.

The Alienware computer the guy linked too is way better than the Dell one. Dell is relativly good if you compare to Compaq and HP but it is crap compared to any computer I ever built (I build them for most of my friends, it is cheaper and youll get better things in them). Alienware do however focus on gaming computer while Dells are more general for average users.

Of course do MMOs generally don't need a state of the art gaming computer unless you want to max out every slider in the game but a gaming computer will last longer.

 I was LOLing.....Anyways OP please state your needs (gaming only or anything else) and most importantly state the size of the monitor you are using or are planning to use (everything in the end depends on this) and your budget ofcourse.....you will be wasting $ if you are buying anything from Dell or Alienware (no offence to fanboys)...

i cant stand buying already built comps but you should check what you can upgrade things to before getting that comp

its going to need more ram first thing :P

Originally posted by Quizzical

As for video cards, Nvidia apparently thinks about enough of their GTS 240 that they won't sell it at retail at all.  Apparently it's a rebranded card from two generations prior, and essentially identical cards can be bought at retail under other names (8800 GT, 9800 GT).  It's probably worth noting that ATI is releasing their next generation of cards next week as well, with lots of good stuff (DirectX 11 support, 40 nm node, GDDR5 memory, etc.).  It's unclear exactly what they'll release; some rumors say only their "Cypress" chip likely to be Radeon 5850/5870, which may be out of your price range, while other rumors are that they'll have their whole next line out and were only waiting on TSMC to get its 40 nm production process fixed.  It's also unclear when the cards will be available at retail, though we'll find out a lot more next week.

You are right about the 240, it is even worse crap than the 250. However can't I agree with your reccomendation of a just released ATI card to a beginner. Nvidia card is a lot more user friendly and it often takes ATI months to get the drivers working as they should after they releases the card. The drivers have always been ATIs weak point and it takes a lot of tweaking to get the most out of the cards. Nvidia handles themselves, just plug it in and install the drivers.

If you're getting a new computer, you should probably get one with DDR3 memory, which is a lot faster than DDR2 and nearly the same price.  The Core 2 architecture is old, though, and only recently have motherboards to have DDR3 have come out.   If you're getting Vista, then 2 GB of memory will not be enough for some games, as Vista wants a ton of memory.  4 GB should be plenty for quite some time to come.

Well, The price for DDR3 is still to high compared to what it makes in performance. It is better to spend those extra money on a better gfx cards then memory, of for that mater on a SSD instead of a regular harddrive. If the OP really feels that she have too much money it will increase performance but 4 gb of DDR2 will always beat 2 gb DDR3.

Speaking of Vista, Microsoft is releasing Windows 7 next month.  Opinions differ on how good Windows 7 will be, but it's almost universally rated as better than Vista.  If you buy a computer with Vista now, you can get a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it releases, but wiping your hard drive to install Windows 7, reinstall everything, track down drivers, etc. is quite a hassle.  You can technically upgrade to Windows 7 without the full wipe, but that's not really the best idea.

I agree, Vista is the second worse OS Ms ever made, only Millenium was worse. Either use XP or wait until W7 is a good advice.

For a hard drive, unless you think you'll need more than 500 GB (check how much space is used on your current hard drive for comparison), the only meaningful upgrade would be a solid state drive, which is probably out of your budget.  Dell won't sell you a good solid state drive, anyway--though they will sell you a bad one and charge you more than you could get a good one for elsewhere.  The short version here is that a solid state drive based on the Intel or Indilinx controller is good, the Samsung controller is mediocre, and the JMicron controller is worse-than-a-rotating-platter-hard-drive junk.  If a company won't tell you what they're selling, you can bet that it's junk.  The difference here is much larger than you might think:  an Intel or Indilinx based drive is literally thousands of times faster at 4 KB random writes than a JMicron one.

That is the reason I have 4 Raided Intel X-25 myself, it is bloody fast and silent. I discused it above but SSD do cost a lot more than a regular harddrive and if you plan to have movies and music on the computer you will need to get a regular harddrive also to put media files on. It is still a better use of the money than the DDR3 memorys however, the harddrive is the biggest bottleneck in a modern computer. So far haowever is this a new technology that costs a lot of money compared to the new stuff.

-----

If you really want someone to give it to you straight, though, my advice would be don't buy from Dell.  They used to be good, but not anymore.  Let me tell you about the computer I'm typing this on, which is a Dell bought in 2007.

No, they didn't. They have never been better than average, it is the fact that Compac and HP sucks so bad that makes you think that.

The other driver installed wrong was the video card.  Right after I got the computer, I tried to run a game that said, sorry, the game won't run because your video card drivers are too old.  A quick trip to the ATI web site to get the right driver fixed that, but it's still an inexcusable blunder on Dell's part.

That wasn't really Dells fault, you should update the drivers at least every third month and when you get the computer. Things change fast and often do the games make so you can't use the older drivers. There is no other driver you need to update often but do update the GFX driver several time a year.

A few months later, the computer crashed, and when I tried to boot it, it wouldn't.  After about four hours of messing with it, I was able to bring up a DOS prompt and back up my data.  After another four hours, I finally got it to boot into safe mode, and shortly after that, it booted up just fine and seemed to be in proper working order.

That is most likely because of your harddrive. One dust particle inside it and this starts to happen. The only thing to do is to backup everything as fast as possible. It is not really Dells fault since it can happen to any Harddrive, even if Dell often use cheap crap drives.

Right around that time, the hard drive started randomly corrupting files.  I got Dell to replace the hard drive two weeks later (as it was still under warranty), and haven't had any problems with the replacement.  It's understandable that hard drives fail now and then, but it's still quite a bad thing to go wrong.

For the video card, I was rather stuck, though.  Apparently Dell found a motherboard with no PCI Express slot (which has been the standard for video cards since about 2004) and used it to sell a gaming computer in 2007.  I could get a video card for the AGP slot, but just not a very good one.  It would entail paying $100 for a slower version of a $50 card that isn't really that fast (which is why it's a $50 card).  After everything else that is wrong with the computer, I'm rather afraid that such an upgrade would fry the power supply, too.

Yeah, that sux. Dell had a lot of old crap lying around and sold it until it they run out of it. But it is your fault too, you should have checked before buying the junk.

Recently the computer started blue screening with a cryptic IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error message and automatically rebooting when I'd try to boot it up.  Repeated reboots (to try to copy down the whole error message, as it reset the computer after only a couple of seconds) finally cleared up the problem after an hour or so, leaving me no idea of what the problem had been.

The IRQ is kinda the post office or a telephone line inside you computer. It is however a thing that is a leftover from the first Pcs so it is not up to date. They have probably used the same IRQ adress (there are 16) for 2 parts, like the GFX card and something else at the same time. It usually works but sometimes the data crashes. Dunno if it is only dells fault here, the system is old legacy crap that is still being used in all PCs.

Also, the Dell mouse sometimes interprets a single click as being a double click.  That can be attributed to normal wear and tear, I guess, and was easily handled by replacing the mouse.

Mouses dies. Nothing strange,you uses the thing a lot and it is not that expensive to get a new one. I often have a spare still in the original box just waiting for the old one to die.

If think you should consider building you own computer instead, you seems to be ready for it. You will get all the instructions you need with the motherboard and when you build your own stuff youll know what you get and it saves money. As long as you are careful it is really not much harder than to change memorys. However is the AMD fan hell to install, I am always scared Ill break it when I install it. Intels is a lot easier.

As for the OP I think you should write down a list of the components you want and give it to the guy in your local computer shop. He should be able to offer you a acceptable price on that. Brand computer always try to use cheap components.

Originally posted by kyse2

i cant stand buying already built comps but you should check what you can upgrade things to before getting that comp

its going to need more ram first thing :P

No. Her Motherboard wont support any upgrade, the only thing in this case to do is to move the old harddrive so she can move the old files she need, and then reformat it and use it as a media storage drive.

Unless she have DDR2 memorys, then they are worth keeping too but I doubt it, dell usually are ate with stuff like that.

The general idea is that  if the motherboard supports the new stuff it is worh keeping but this one have a old processor slot, probably DDR memorys and possibly a AGP port. Also will the FSB of it be slow.

Anyone with a single core processor should save what he can (harddrive, maybe PSU and possibly memorys) and get  a new computer. It is usually only the harddrive that isworth keeping, not counting keyboard, mouse and screen.

 Quizzicals post was very well thought out and I agree with most of it.. although, depending on how much you're spending there are many MOBOs right now (amd anyways) that support a wide range of processors and memory types for upgradability. I know some intel boards do as well.. just be careful... look around on newegg and get product reviews if you're building your own.

I have to say, do NOT buy a dell as quizzical said....  just recently I had an old client call me as they bought their new dell about 6 months ago that I setup for them. (I didn't recommend it to them).  Apparently they were getting crashes and the dell tech told them they needed to reinstall windows.  They called me and it was a bad hard drive. I told them to call back dell and give them the information I told them, in which case Dell decided to replace the hard drive.  The tech they had come out to replace it for them did the old Dell and switch on them, where he just switched out the hard drive for a REFURBISHED one.. (not even a new one here folks) and then proceeded to take the old one without loading windows or allowing them to keep any of the information.. much less destroy any information currently on the drive.  

When they told me what happened I was pretty furious....  plus the driver disk the tech left for them.. all the drivers were wrong... the PC kept crashing. We had to track down old driver information for the video and network cards so we could pull the correct ones off of dells site.       

HP or Sony both have better support..... but building your own is where its at... but only if you have the composure to fix problems on your own when you encounter them for instance.. if your video card breaks, you'd have to RMA it on your own.... luckily factory warranties on this stuff are pretty good..... 3 years for some parts... 5 years for others...  Oh and one of the biggest upgrades you can do.. which IS worth the cash... is going with a good SSD .....  you will visually see a performance difference.