Assembled Computer

[primablinkie]

Hi everyone,

I am new to the city and to this forum as well. I wanted to purchase an assembled computer which can watch TV and is Windows Vista enabled. Does anyone has any to sell or can anyone please refer me to a store which does computer assembly and is reliable? Computers like this cost at least $1K from HP and I found some good deals from Craigslist for around $600 but doubt their reliability. Please if anyone have experience please point me to a good store. Thank you in advance!

:)

[Ninjahedge]

Try this:

www.pricegrabber.com

It is a listing of things, try looking through their menus or try looking for "system" or "barebone".

Places like Newegg are great. There are other stores that also have some good deals.

Now if you want to assemble yourself, it is not as hard as it seems and is a VERY good learning experience. Try www.sharkyextreme.com for some price point system guides or www.tomshardware.com for some advice. Also www.cnet.com is handy as well ass www.hardocp.com


Good luck in your search.

Oh, to check on the reputation of a store online, you can also try www.resellerratings.com to get some, well, ratings on resellers! ;)

[ironmike9110]

i dont know of any computers that have tv's built into them, but there is this thing that u hook to a cable/sattelite cord called slingbox. It allows u to watch ur tv from anywhere in the world...more indepth info is on their website, www.slingmediabox.com (http://www.slingmediabox.com) or www.slingbox.com (http://www.slingbox.com) one of them.

[STR]

Hi everyone,

I am new to the city and to this forum as well. I wanted to purchase an assembled computer which can watch TV and is Windows Vista enabled. Does anyone has any to sell or can anyone please refer me to a store which does computer assembly and is reliable? Computers like this cost at least $1K from HP and I found some good deals from Craigslist for around $600 but doubt their reliability. Please if anyone have experience please point me to a good store. Thank you in advance!

:)

I'd buy a PC with the following:

*Athlon X2 3800+ or better Athlon X2 CPU If you don't mind waiting a month Intel will release its new Core 2 , the replacement for the Pentium 4.
*nForce4 based Socket 939 motherboard
*1 or 2 GB of RAM (The Athlon X2 uses PC3200 RAM)
*300GB SATA hard drive (any major brand)
*ATI X1800XL All in Wonder video card. (The all in wonder part is important, it has the TV decoder, as well as the jacks you need. The regular X1800 is just a standard 3d graphics card) The X1800 will allow you to run Windows Vista with no slowdowns and all features enabled.
*A DVD+/-R drive would be good if you want to be able to burn your own DVD recordings of shows. These drives can also read/write CD as well, though you'll want a 2nd DVD/CD-ROM for copying discs.

If you don't have the confidence to build a PC yourself, just take the parts list and give to your local PC repair shop and get a quote.

If you don't want to bother with Windows Vista, just get a cheapo ATI AiW card. (Link (http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__ATI_All_In_Wonder_2006_Edition_Radeon_9600_Vide o_Card,__11480222/search=all+in+wonder)) Otherwise you're going to spend $1,000 or you're going to need a new PC when Vista comes out.

[Ninjahedge]

STR has a good setup, but it may be a little pricy for hat you ar elooking for.

If you tell us everything you MUST have it be able to do we can give you a system that is more taylored for that.

Then if you have things you would LIKE it to do, we could go from there.

Just realize that if you want to build a system, with no monitor or any other parts available from a previous machine, it may be hard to get one that would be able to do things like Photoshop (for advanced photo editing), play the new games, rotate things in 3D etc etc for $1000 or less.

I was able to put together a good system for about $900 all told, but I used parts from previous machines AND I put in a $200 video card.....

But that was me...

Let us know what you need!