For the past eight years, ever since I got tired of building them myself, our primary workstations have been Dells. They’ve served us well; only a couple of times have we had hardware problems and when we did, they were promptly fixed. My current system is an XPS and it’s a behemoth of a machine that weighs a ton and sounds like a 747 taking off when you power it up. I’ve had it for about two and a half years now and although I’m running Windows 7 on it and it works well, but it maxes out at 4 GB of RAM. Once upon a time, that was plenty for anything you’d ever want to do, but today, with VMs and video editing and a 64 bit OS, one longs for more.

The Dell XPS is a loud monster, but it gets the job done

Tom’s been chugging along with a Dell P4 for even longer, about 3 or 3 and a half years now. I’ve been trying to talk him into getting a new system for over a year, but he has an aversion to “new” (unlike me – I love nothing more than setting up a brand new computer). Finally, last night, he decided to take the plunge, and we ordered a pair of HP m9600ts with Nehalem (Core i7) processors and loaded down with RAM. Price with a $300 discount coupon for the configuration with 12 GB of DDR3 RAM was only $1149 – who could say no to that?

The HP may not look as impressive as the XPS, but the price and specs were right

The most significant thing about this purchase is that it represents a radical departure from previous brand loyalty. We might have been more hesitant, if not for the Media Center PC that we got from HP a year or so ago. It’s been a great, fast system and the only problem we’ve had with it was a hard drive that died – something that can happen with any computer vendor.

We probably would have bought Dells again, if not for the fact that a similarly configured Dell came in at hundreds of dollars more. We were also encouraged by the reviews of the HP that said it’s not only an excellent value for the money, but is also very quiet. That will be nice.

I look forward to posting a full review here once they arrive and we get a chance to play with them for a while.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com