Home Computer Help??

I'm looking for a little computer advice at the moment if anybody a little wiser could help.
My current home computer is starting to show signs that the end may be nigh, it has frozen
a few times and shut itself off twice. I have no cause for complaint as it has offered fault free
service and fast start ups for the last 4 years. It's a Dell XPS 8500 with the following spec:

Memory 8192MB (4x2GB) 1600MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Video Card AMD Radeon™ HD 7570 1GB DDR5 Graphics Card
Hard Drive 1TB Serial ATA (7,200 rpm)
Optical Devices 16x DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD)
Sound Cards Integrated 7.1 with WAVE MAXXAudio 4

I want to make the plunge and upgrade with something off the Dell website again.
Budget is in around €800/900 without a monitor. The problem is I'm clueless when
it comes to reading computer spec. If anybody who's knowledgable about such stuff
would be able to spend 5 minutes browsing the Dell desktop section and maybe pointing
me towards something I'd be eternally greatful.

http://www.dell.com/ie/p/desktops?s=dhs&~ck=mn

What do you use your computer for really depends on which one. Internet browsing or running games and programmes. ?


Sent from a land far far away

Thanks for the reply. The computer is used for browsing the Internet and editing and storing photographs. No gaming.

What do you use to edit ? I know photoshop can be quite heavy on a computer. Personally I have 4gb ram (would like higher but not needed to much if not gaming) and a ssd instead of a hdd. Ssd have huge speed increase over a standard hdd drive. For your price range tho you can get something fairly nice. The dell inspiron around €650 would be perfect there's not much need for something higher unless it's for gaming and most of dells stuff is built into a monitor not by the looks of there website so unless you want to spend 1000 plus on Alienware that's about the best dell offer


Sent from a land far far away

How much of the 1Tb disk space is used?

The spec you've outlined on your existing machine sounds like its decent enough for a home machine that does what you've said. If performance has disimproved then, if you're disk isn't nearly full then defragging the disk might help (depending on your operating system version its likely to be under Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Defragment your hard drive), empty your recycle bin, clear cookies, temporary internet files, etc. and see if that helps a bit. If your drive is more than about 80% full then a cleanup there would probably help performance a bit too (if you clean out unnecessary files, don't forget to empty the recycle bin too). If there isn't much you can clean up then a hard drive upgrade might eek a bit more life out of the machine. After that, checking that all patches, etc. are all up to date would be useful. Sometimes these can be a factor in machines slowing down over time.

Unless you really feel the need for a new machine, I'd say that you could get more life out of what you have with a little bit of maintenance, as above. If its not something you're comfortable with doing yourself then if you have a PC World or some other PC Repair provider then they can probably do all of this for a fairly small cost.

Just a thought in our "built in obsolescence", throwaway consumer goods world :)

As said your current machine is decent enough spec. I would hang onto it, upgrade to an SSD drive, €100 gets you a 250GB SSD drive nowadays. Reinstall your OS onto the SSD along with your applications and use the 1TB as storage.

I would give similar advice of repairing/reinstalling the OS or SSD upgrade, but another option if you're set on a new PC would be to recycle some of your existing components into a new machine and build your own. You could use the following:

Memory 8192MB (4x2GB) 1600MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Video Card AMD Radeon™ HD 7570 1GB DDR5 Graphics Card - Assuming its PCIe
Hard Drive 1TB Serial ATA (7,200 rpm)
Optical Devices 16x DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD)

If you're to go down the route of building your own PC, you'd need a case, motherboard, CPU (I5 would be fine), few case fans and PSU. Would advise as Dave said, get a SSD as your primary drive and use the 1TB drive as your repository. If you get a decent case and PSU, you can upgrade other parts in a few years at your leisure.

Considerably cheaper than buying a new PC (very easy to assemble), only downside if any component goes you'll have to chase the particular manufacturer for replacement.

Thank you one and all for the replies, much appreciated.
Some more info on the machine itself. I have absolutely no problems with it's speed
or storage capacity. It starts up quite quickly and never noticeably slows while carrying
out any task. My only concern is I feel something fairly major is failing inside it.
With increasing frequency I'm starting to get problems starting up where the monitor won't
automatically switch on even though you can hear the computer starting up. After resetting
to rectify this I get the black screen message telling me windows has recovered from a major
fault and needs to check stuff before continuing.
In all I'd say this has probably happened about 6 times in the last month. When the machine does it's
check and then starts as normal everything performs flawlessly again.

On another totally unrelated note, while I have ye here, is there a way to get an old laptop running xp
working again when you've forgotten the user and admin log in passwords?

The issue that your having with booting could be simply something like the RAM needing to be reseated or replaced to the operating system needing to be reinstalled. Elements of your OS can get corrupted over time. A fresh install would do a lot. You could reinstall the OS to its factory state and see if that resolves it.

CTRL + F11 I think brings you into the recovery console on a Dell at boot. You can restore it to its factory state from there.

You can get loads of tools that will allow you to delete or recover the password on xp. What you can also do is turn on the administrative account through dos, boot into that and remove the password from the other account.

I'd agree with Dave. It sounds like the machine just needs a little TLC.

A couple of years of wear and tear plus loads of OS and application patches, firmware and driver updates and additions, etc. can all lead to what you've described. It shouldn't cost a lot to have a computer repair shop do the clean up for you if you're not comfortable with it. There are plenty of local small outfits and I'm sure you'll find a few in your own locale but I know also that places like PC World would also have had a service like it in the past, but not sure if they still do.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xworks

On another totally unrelated note, while I have ye here, is there a way to get an old laptop running xp
working again when you've forgotten the user and admin log in passwords?

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Download this:

https://falconfour.wordpress.com/201...b-v4-6-f4ubcd/

Burn to CD, boot from it and there is a tool to reset/display local windows passwords.

On a very old dell machine myself right now and running xp. Have been getting very similar issues but I had assumed it was in part due to the fact Microsoft discontinued support for XP last year IIRC?

If you're running xp, you're on a 10 year old box, bin it and don't look back.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dave

If you're running xp, you're on a 10 year old box, bin it and don't look back.

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My own with vista or 7, I don't recall, shat itself so I'm on this for the next while.