If you want to spend on more power, go for a work station with a 64 bit operating system.

Thanks Allen. That's a good tip!

Someone
Make sure you get a desktop with a top-notch cooling system, if you're gonna spend the bucks for a high-end workhorse.

I am seriously considering just that ozoneocean; even if I have to break the bank to do so. I am tired of being way behind the technological curve.

Someone
If you want to spend on more power, go for a work station with a 64 bit operating system.

I have both. My desktop computer is a Mac Pro, so there's no portable substitute, really. I want the processing power to run Photoshop, and I want my big screen and my Wacom. The laptop is a G4 Powerbook with a 13-inch screen that sort of fell into my hands for free. I probably wouldn't have been willing to buy one, but it's nice to have. I use it for work pretty much exclusively, which means it only has to run Neooffice and Firefox, really, so it does the trick just fine and dandy. I wouldn't want to have to lug around a laptop with a larger screen, but I need the large one at home for Photoshop, so… yeah.

Yeah, if you want a good system, splurge and go for Alienware. My husband just spent $4,000 on one, and it has a liquid cooling system, something like dual quad video cards, 4GB RAM…..it's insane. But it'll last him for a few years at least.

But watch out–if you do indeed go with Alienware, don't use Paypal to purchase your system!! My husband used Paypal, because the Alienware website has that as a payment option. A few weeks later, Alienware rejected his payment without telling him. When he called Alienware, they said it was “due to Paypal's reputation.” Well then, don't have that as a payment option, dumbasses! After a month of yelling at Alienware and getting his $4,000 refunded, he finally got his computer. Argh.

right now i do all my work off my laptop, but thats because its “my” first computer all its predisessors were desktops and “family computers”i have to say i prefer desktops, as you can get a pretty reliable one for a half decent price and from my expieriences they hold up better and longer but portablility is great too. eventually im gonna get my own desktop computer too and hopefully q=work off both m laptop and my desktop.

from a completely artistic point of view though i have to say desktops all the way simply because laptop screens can get annoying when working with colour, tilt it just slightly and everything can look different, but i desktop monitor generally doesnt move so you have more consistant imaging.

When they make detachable 30“ monitors and touchpads the size of a tablet, I might lol! As of now, no way. For over a year I had to work on a laptop with a 1200+ by 1000+ screen resolution and a 15” monitor. Turned my eyes into a bloody pulp. Now I use a new desktop computer and a 19" iiyama monitor at work - and you can tell the difference.

I won't be. I rather like being able to push every new game to the limits and have my computer laugh at it. Laptops have their place, but not for gaming, rendering, and working in complicated programs that require good amounts of memory.

Laptops suck. I can't play stepmania as well on them. They keys are just too close together.

My 2 cents worth of ranting. Having an IT major, a lot of my classmates/ friends have laptops. They ARE CONVENIENT, and PORTABLE (if they didn't have laptops we'd be cluttered in groups of 4-5 students/PC during labs.) But that's about it. A laptop isn't good for someone who uses a PC more than 3-4 hours/day (like most DD users, right?), whatever they may be doing on it (except composing music maybe).

The keyboard is too tightly packed => strained muscles if used for too long.
The touchpad is…. not sensitive enough for art.
etc.

There are exceptions to the rule (most MacBooks) but they are FREAKYSHLY expensive(even more for someone who's still sticking to his Duron 1300 :P).

I personally stick to desktop for work & play.

lastcall
Yeah, if you want a good system, splurge and go for Alienware. My husband just spent $4,000 on one, and it has a liquid cooling system, something like dual quad video cards, 4GB RAM…..it's insane. But it'll last him for a few years at least.

But watch out–if you do indeed go with Alienware, don't use Paypal to purchase your system!! My husband used Paypal, because the Alienware website has that as a payment option. A few weeks later, Alienware rejected his payment without telling him. When he called Alienware, they said it was “due to Paypal's reputation.” Well then, don't have that as a payment option, dumbasses! After a month of yelling at Alienware and getting his $4,000 refunded, he finally got his computer. Argh.

hahaha
i think me and him got the same PC

CharleyHorse
The old games are the best games.

I think that the analysts that insist people are turning away from desktop PCs in favor of laptops are failing to consider that people are instead purchasing laptops in addition to the desktops that they already have.

I prefer to use both. Laptops are great for Internet use and gaming (I play WoW on my Dell laptop and it runs just fine), but I prefer to work on a desktop. Instead of replacing my old desktop, which is a fine computer, I have taken it off the Internet and I network files with a thumb drive. Works pretty well.

I use two towers and a Laptop…
I work across 5 hard drives+
1 zip drive.

and a green monkey.

Well, my current desktop unit is a four years old PowerSpec running at 3.00Ghz with a Pentium Four Intel chip system and with one gigabyte of ram and a 140 gigabyte hard drive. the operating system is Windows XP.

Yesterday we decided to be proactive, because I THINK this old unit is about to go belly-up on me, and bought a desktop replacement system, although I'm giong to wait until after Christmas to un-crate it and hook it up.

The new desk top system is a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Elite m9040n. This translates into it being a quad-core cpu system running at 2.4Ghz with 3gigabytes of ram and a 640 gig hard drive . Hot digity!

It comes with the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system. The graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS 256MB DDR2 Low Profile Support PCI Express, which is supposed to be decent.

This system by itself was just at $1,000 U.S., which was honestly enough for me. I would have been happy to attach my eighteen inch monitor to it and call it a done-deal. To my further surprise, however, the wife insisted on upgrading to a 22 inch monitor; and that cost us another three hundred bucks. Anyway after purchasing the Desk top system and the new monitor and a two year warranty and a new UPS battery system and a few minor odds and ends the price topped out at just over $2,000.

Now I don't casually plop down two thousand dollars on anything without a qualm and serious second thoughts, but this purchase should ensure that we can run any software that comes down the pike for at least another half decade. I am pleased with the purchase. yeah, I would have liked to have an even more powerful system with even more bells and whistles but the thing is easily upgradeable and being a Intel fiddle of a quad-core cpu system it will remain technologically competitive for years to come. So to repeat, I'm happy with it.

Oh, and it was the great information that I received from fellow DrunkDuckers that helped me to research this buy and ultimately decide on replacing this old system with another desktop setup rather than a laptop.

Taking what I learned from the rest of you I did a little additional studying on my own and then kicked up the computer review services. Thus I narrowed down my needs versus my wants and my outright fantasies, compared this to my budget, and then discovered that two major review services both spotlighted the HP Elite m9040n quad core as the best bang for the bucks currently available on the market.

This, therefore, is a thank you everybody from ol' CharleyHorse.

I checked into having a laptop but I also realized that for what I need the computer for, a desktop best serves my needs. It's been a few months now and my Dell xps 410 has been quite good. I'm very happy with it. Instead of the duo core processor I went with a quad core and I'm happy I did it. I also looked into a mac because I like the fact that macs don't get bugs like PC's do, but the price tag was far out of my reach. Anyhow, if you go with a PC go with a Dell. They're not bad and they're reasonably priced.

The computer review services I mentioned both rated Dell and HP at the top of their listings as far as power and reliability and just pure bang for the bucks go. I believe I entered “Best Computers 2007” in my search engine and immediately hit paydirt.

At the moment the only thing I don't know is if my new computer is a 32 or a 64 bit system. Actually though it probably would not have mattered to me, much, at the time anyway as I was looking for overall performance for my price range.

I do have a bit of advice, though, for anyone contemplating a new computer system, be it a desktop or a laptop; and that is apply only half or two-thirds of what you can ultimately afford, or have budgeted, on the pc itself. In other words if all you can afford is a one thousand dollar system then look for one in the five hundred to seven hundred dollar/ruble/franc/whatever price range, BECAUSE aside from the PCs base price there are taxes, the extended warranty, and possibly you will then decide to upgrade your monitor or purchase a uninterruptable power supply unit, or something moderately and annoyingly expensive along those lines.

It'll be a 64 bit processor but you'll be running 32 bit Vista.
Vsita 64 bit just doesn't have the hardware support for people like HP to put it on systems yet… You could probably do it yourself though, but if you want to work in a 64 bit enviornment on Windows it's probably best to go with XP 64bit.

I should have done that when I bought my new PC. Vista has various irritating little bugs… One of the most anoying of which is that the damn customised Nvidia colour settings all reset to default when the screen shuts down to save power (After 10 minutes of inactivity I set my screens to turn off). So you have to reset them each time. it only takes a second but I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO IT!
Also, the response of the music control on the keyboard for anything but Windows media player (or media centre) is patchy. Some media programs work fine, some only work fine while they're selected and some, like Winamp 2 (my fave) don't respond at all to the keyboard music controls. -I looked it up, it's a Vista thing.

shaneronzio
I use two towers and a Laptop…
I work across 5 hard drives+
1 zip drive.

and a green monkey.

You shouldn't do that. I hear green monkeys give you viruses… You computer prolly has AIDS now. :(

Thanks for the information OzoneOcean. I confess to being a bit worried about updating to Vista. I really wanted to wait another year for more of the bugs to get worked out, but it was time to make the jump.

ozoneocean
One of the most annoying of which is that the damn customized Nvidia colour settings all reset to default when the screen shuts down to save power (After 10 minutes of inactivity I set my screens to turn off). So you have to reset them each time. it only takes a second but I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO IT!

Amen to that observation and comment! I'm not looking forward to that problem. On the other hand I keep an actual MSN monthly subscription going and so it gives me a bit more preferential treatment when it comes to trouble shooting my MSN bugs than other people get. In VISTA's case it might just be enough to get them to tell me how to work around that. If I do learn the secret I'll pass it along. If they haven't even bothered to address the problem though then . . . then nothing, I guess. It's MSN and there's not a lot that anybody can do where they and their rotten software is concerned.

We shall just have to wait and see.

I'll begin putting the system together in the near future. I'm not actually in a screaming hurry to get things up and running. I hate wrestling with software and tweaking everything so that it plays together nicely.

It's times like that when I wish that I were still a drinking man, I'll tell you what!

I'll do a bit more research on the 64 bit problem too as time permits. I'm intending to do a bit of modeling work with Blender and some programming with DarkBasic Professional in the near future, and I may or may not find it advantageous to push the 64 bit issue with this system.

CharleyHorse

PS: I've also kept my power setting on a ten minute interval. I wonder if the same reset occurs if one forgoes the power saving route and employs a screen saver instead? I don't want to do it that way, but I might in order to keep my settings where I've set them! As i said above regarding other items with the VISTA operating system, I'll have to think about it and do a bit of research as time permits.

As for screens, the savers are a hangover from the CRT days to stop static images burning into the… something or other :)
They use the same power. But the vista ones look nice ^^
-and the reset doesn't happen when the saver comes on…
In fact it's not really a reset per-se, Vista just ignores the Nvidia colour setting when the monitor comes back on after the powersave/timed shutdown. So you just open the Nvida panel and the settings are still there, just touch a slider and it's restored. If you have more than one monitor you have to do it individually for all of them though.

If you haven't customised the colour with the Nvidia control panel you don't have to worry…. Vista does tend to set a lot of things back to what they were before you changed them though…
What I'm going to do is make the power setting take a lot longer (40 minutes?) and simply switch off my screen instead for shorter non-use periods.