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Parents need a new computer

KrugKrug Registered User regular
in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
My old Dell XPS (from maybe 2004) that my parents have been using finally gasped its final breath this morning, and I just don't think it's worth it anymore to keep trying to replace individual parts.

I'm fairly comfortable building them something, but before I do that I was wondering if anyone had good opinions of any pre-fab pc's. I'm only interested in windows systems, do not need monitor, speakers, or any other peripherals, and the only gaming they do is the occasional game of solitaire, though one of these days I may get them Plants v Zombies or something.

The only other concern being the data they have on the old PC(my dad loves his hundreds of bookmarks). I would be ok just getting something like this, sticking the old HD inside (windows XP), and then plugging it in right?

Posts

  • kaliyamakaliyama Left to find less-moderated fora Registered User regular
    Prefab makes the most sense here bc they do t need the bang:buck of sourcing your own parts. As of a year ago I priced things out on newegg: PCs are more commodity products than ever, so on the low end ($5-700) Dell products leverage economies of scale in production and purchasing such that custom building is rarely cheaper. Any slight edge from custom building is lost when you price in a copy of windows that adept licenses cheap and builds into the system cost.

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  • DrunkMcDrunkMc Registered User regular
    edited June 2013
    Yeah, agreed. For a gaming rig where you want to get high quality parts and have the option to upgrade over the years I build it myself. To get my parents back on the internet and playing Solitaire I just grab them a Dell.

    "Sticking the old HD inside" may give you a ton of trouble though. If its from 2004 it may be IDE and the new PC might be SATA. Also, you're going to have tons of drivers from the old PC on your boot drive and on start up Windows is going to freak out a bit as it tries to figure that out.

    I would, if you can, hook up the old boot drive as a secondary drive. Boot off the fresh one, pull all the data off of the old drive onto the new one that you need and then ditch the old drive. And get your Dad to start using Chrome so all his bookmarks are automatically saved to the cloud.

    DrunkMc on
  • BigityBigity Lubbock, TXRegistered User regular
    The deal on woot today is a refurb HP desktop, pretty decent at less than $500.

    http://www.woot.com/offers/hp-envy-six-core-desktop-w-10gb-ram-3

    They have a couple other choices as well.

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