Want to redo my computer situation

bficky

(Sorry in advance for how long this post is.)

So I’m thinking I want to rearrange my computer situation at my house. We are very behind the times technology wise, and I want to kinda come up with a strategy for buying/upgrading.

Right now, we’ve got:

• 8 year old piece of shit desktop: located in the back room/office/play room, WinXP, CRT monitor, 80GB HDD, wired to printer, wirelessly connected to network, barely runs (basically acts as a wireless print server), gets BSoD all the time, takes multiple minutes to open up Firefox/IE.
• 2 year old Acer Aspire 5735 15.6” laptop: located on the living room coffee table, Vista, 3GB DDR2 RAM, 2.16 GHz dual core, 250GB HDD, built-in video card, pretty crap resolution (1366x768), we have two profiles set up so that me and my wife don’t have to log each other out to get to our mail all the time but the “every program running twice” is really hurting performance (Hulu streaming is choppy), wirelessly connected to network, bad battery life (due to the massive screen probably), heavy and not the most portable. Seems like it should/could be better than it is.
• Two iPhone 4s
• PS3: in living room, wired to network, accesses PlayOn that’s running on the laptop.
• DLink wireless N router: located next to and wired to PS3 and DirecTV DVR in the living room, but away from both desktop and laptop.
• HP printer/scanner/copier: not wireless, connected to desktop in the back room

Yeah, aside from the iPhones, not the best lineup of technology. Upgrades have been a long time coming, but the last few years have been rough money wise. It’s getting better, so we’re starting to think of what we want to do. I’m not really liking the laptop right now, as it’s got some annoying hardware problems (clasp for opening the screen is busted so it’s slightly difficult to open the screen, left trackpad button is kinda loose, when switching profiles sometimes it gets stuck in 640x480 and we need to restart to fix it, the built in memory card reader has stopped working twice, only to start working again after a week or two). No matter what we do, we’re not doing the multiple user accounts thing again… it sucks.

Our basic uses:

• Every night, I play my PS3, while my wife hogs the laptop and sits on the sofa reading blogs and coupon websites. When not gaming, I resort to surfing the internet on my phone until we turn on a TV show she’s really interested in, then I may get to have the laptop for a while. I do most of my PA forum and RSS reading either at work during lunch or on my iPhone.
• I don’t do any PC gaming, and I don’t really see myself starting, but that might be because I kinda don’t have it as an option right now, as the desktop is useless and I rarely use the laptop. Don’t know how gaming on the laptop would work anyway, as it lives on the coffee table. I’d have to go sit in the dining room or something if I really wanted to play a kb&m game.
• A lot of our programs are web based. We use Google for most things: we each have Google accounts for email, calendars, contacts, etc. We use Picasa for photo management (we take a TON of pictures) and use Picasa Web Albums (under my account) for sharing. We share an iTunes account. We use OpenOffice for our very light word processing/spreadsheet needs but I don’t really like the spreadsheet one as much as Excel. We have PlayOn on the laptop for streaming to the PS3, but we rarely use it, and when we do, it’s for watching Hulu.

Here are my initial thoughts on what to get/do:

• Obviously the desktop needs to go. What I’m not sure of is if we need a new one or not. Not having a desktop seems weird, but we’re never back there to actually use it. We have the room for one in the back room, as we have a nice built in corner desk that’s perfect for a workstation, but again, never really back there. One thought I had was repurposing the Acer laptop into a desktop. Just plug in a cheap 19” LCD monitor, a real keyboard and mouse, the printer, and boom, acceptable desktop. Most of the hardware issues it has (battery, resolution, opening the screen) would be minimized. In terms of a desktop replacement, though, the main issues then are the small HDD and the lack of a real video card. Reusing the laptop for this purpose might be forcing it, but it feels like a waste to abandon a $500 laptop after 2 years.
• I’d really like for each of us to have a portable computing option. Some combination of the following, I guess: a tablet/iPad, a netbook, and a laptop (either the Acer or a new one). I don’t really want “his” and “hers” machines. I think I like the idea of different machines for different purposes, and we use the one we need, not use the one that’s ours. Would a netbook running Chrome, a iPad running iOS, and a desktop/laptop running Vista or 7 be useful (each thing has its strengths) or would it be a networking nightmare? I’d love to have everything synced and working in harmony (favorites, My Documents, etc.).
• Not really sure what to do with the data (mainly our iTunes library and our pictures/videos). It’s not that big (50 GB or so) but I’d like to get more into media streaming, so I’d like room to grow. Do I have a dedicated machine (either the desktop/laptop in the back or a portable laptop in the living room) that houses all the data and everything networks into it to access it? Get a cheap NAS server to hold everything? Mirror everything between the machines with Windows Live Sync? If I start streaming more to my PS3, I obviously shouldn’t do it from our wireless laptop like I am now.

So yeah, kind of a big question, but does anyone have any advice? Do you have a setup that works well? I haven’t really thought about budget, but since nothing’s really pressing right now and I can spread the upgrades out over a year, maybe $1000 or so (maybe more).

All advice/comments/suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

Rikushix

If you're having problems using the Acer laptop as the hub for you and your wife, then I would use most of your budget and buy a new computer. You can get a great desktop computer for well under $1000, easily.

There's nothing outright wrong with buying a standard HP or Dell from a big box store but us tech geeks might prefer a different outlet. May I suggest Newegg, Tigerdirect, or my personal favourite NCIX (which is more Canadian but whatever)?

Also, if you have the time to wait and you're reasonably proficient with tech instructions and how-tos, why not build your own computer? I'm not sure how familiar you are with computer hardware but if you aren't, I guarantee you, it's a lot easier than it sounds! (and not in the "Linux is easier to use than it looks!" way)

I built my first computer - the one I'm using right now - a year and a half ago and it went extremely well. For about $1200 - and that was after EVERYTHING, including tax, shipping, and an operating system - I made a pretty damn good gaming PC. After ordering all the parts, I spent about three or four hours putting it all together, tops, and that was that. I could probably build a basic computer in two hours or less now that I can assemble components with the confidence that they're compatible.

Advantages to this?

You get to choose all the components pretty much individually, so a) you know exactly what you're getting, and b) you're not paying money for parts you find superfluous, nor missing out on ones you want.

Also, contrary to what you might think about buying in bulk, putting a computer together yourself from individual components will save you around 10-20% off an equivalent computer from a big box store. If shipping is decent, there are great savings to be had.

Disadvantages?

The hardest thing isn't putting the computer together, it's doing your research beforehand and understanding the various things you have to know about computer building that are essential before you plug X into Y. The worst thing that can happen is that you buy a whole load of parts and find out that they aren't compatible with each other. Read up on the best "basics of computer building" websites, and check and double check the specifications of the parts you want to buy: does your PCI-E video card fit your motherboard? Is your power supply powerful enough to support all of your components (the power supply is a big one because realistically it's the only element of your rig that could actually do some damage if you fuck up. Don't buy a 300 W power supply if you're buying a video card, make sure there's enough current running on the 12 volt rail, don't switch to European power while your computer is turned on, etc etc etc)

Also make a list of things that you will need your computer for - consult your wife on this one. What are you going to be plugging into it, for example? Check your motherboard specs to see how many USB ports it will have. Do you mind hooking up an ethernet cable to your modem? If you do, you're going to have to make sure your motherboard has a built in wireless adapter, or buy one separately. And so on and so forth.

Another disadvantage: it's entirely possible that one (or more) parts might be DOA. The downside to dealing with building a computer is that it has the potential to take a lot of time and test a lot of patience through NO FAULT OF YOUR OWN whatsoever. Be prepared, just in case, to RMA a component and ship it back where it came from.

I recommend building your own, though. If you're feeling confident, it's a great idea, and it's fun, too!

Kate of Lokys

Using device utility to determine usage is nice in theory, but in reality, you end up with an organizational nightmare unless you each have your own account on all of the devices, which you say you don't want to do. Without multiple accounts, though, unless you and your wife have identical preferences and interests and browsing habits, sharing devices is a pain in the ass. I know it would drive me absolutely nuts to share both a computer and a user profile with my fiance: I love him dearly, he and I are both highly technologically literate people, but we're just polar opposites in a whole bunch of ways when it comes to how we use computers. I can't stand having more than a single line of icons on my desktop, most of which are .txt files I use for storing confirmation numbers and login info and notes; his desktop is so cluttered, I can't even tell what wallpaper he's using. I store all of my media in C:\Media\Recursive List of Directories; he uses the default Windows directories for everything. I use foobar; he uses iTunes. It doesn't sound like much, but those little differences really add up, to the point where if he needs to print out an invoice, he just emails it to me and has me take care of it, because that's easier than him trying to mess around on my computer.

Would it be feasible for you to put a desktop in the PS3/TV room? If so, that strikes me as being a fairly easy solution. A compact workstation shouldn't take up too much space, and it would let you do everything you want to do: you could work on it, print from it, store all your media on it, and stream music and movies to the PS3 over a fast, secure, hard-wired connection. Having it in the same room would let you and your wife enjoy each other's company while pursuing your different interests, and desktops are just orders of magnitude more comfortable to work on than the vast majority of laptops. Any sort of modern desktop will be miles faster than anything you're used to, so you could very easily have separate user accounts on it without having to worry about slowdowns or crashes.

A basic Dell or home-built system should only set you back $500 or so; you don't need a six-core processor or a water-cooled video card. With the remaining $500, an iPad would probably be a very good fit - for the "reading blogs on the couch" style of computing your wife does, an iPad is infinitely better than a netbook or a laptop: better battery life, better screen, lighter, and you can just *hold* the damned thing instead of trying to juggle it on your lap.