I need a computer

[mike_rbm]

Lucky you Suzy.

I had IT pros laugh about how a salesman tried to talk them into something that was not needed but CDW said it was. I wonder what commision level our salesman was shooting for?  ??? I had my office manager call for more products and she got the hard sell with a bunch of lies regarding flat screen monitors.

CDW was a nice company about 8 years ago. Now there a giant and there poor service and sneaky ways are unfortunate.  >:(

Whoever you are and whatever you need - with anything in life - shop around.

[Woofentino Pugrossi]

We bought a Compaq Piesario a while back. We really like it. Reasonably priced and lots of memory for storage.

My first modern PC was a Presario. Went from a 1mhz Apple //e to a 350mhz Presario 5150 in 99.  ;D But after 3 yrs of having to reformat the stupid thing every 6 months (constant crashes), I build my own now. So far built 7 and no problems with each excluding the PEBKAC and ID10T errors. ;D

[dylanfan53]

Hey MJ,
Check out Alexa's post in the "If you need a holiday gift" thread a few posts down.  The newegg.com machine that she found looks like a good deal.

[EM JAY]

 
 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=999946000050008&type=product&productCategoryId=cat01173&id=pcmprd46200050008

  This is what I think I'm gonna go for, whata ya think?  

[spyderchick]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=999946000050008&type=product&productCategoryId=cat01173&id=pcmprd46200050008

  This is what I think I'm gonna go for, whata ya think?  

Pretty basic. Something to think about is that e-machines have some level of proprietary hardware, making upgrades a little more difficult. (My father -n law has an older model) The fact that they are including a CRT (and not an LCD) at that price, makes it seem a little pricey. I think you could do better, actually.

[spyderchick]

Here are some links on newegg.com

monitor
I have the NU monitor at the top of the page, it rocks.

box
About the same as the Emachine, smaller hard drive, but unless you have a ton of video or pix, you wont need anything much bigger. Also, the card reader and 2 USB slots on the front are nice, and it has a couple of PCI slots on the motherboard if you'd like to add a sound card or video card later on. You can also add another HD if you need to.

printer
If you buy the box, they show a $50 rebate on certain printers, one way to lower your cost.

Newegg also has their "bill me later" option, which is cool, but don't overspend, cuz it's really easy to do that.

After that, if you do some burning, you'll want an additional optical drive, those are all fairly cheap.

These are just suggestions to help you compare costs. Keep looking around and see of anyone else has any other suggestions.