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#16
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Still shopping, one or two easy questions
micky wrote:
In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 28 Aug 2020 09:06:22 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote: Rene Lamontagne wrote: On 2020-08-27 3:38 p.m., Chris wrote: micky wrote: In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:11:13 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote: On 27 Aug 2020 at 06:20:19 BST, "micky" wrote: I was busy for a while so I'm back to shopping. Microcenter only has branches in 20 cities or so, but their webpage is very good in terms of the detail it gives. For example, they usually? tell you how much RAM it comes with, how many slots for RAM there are, how many are used, and what's the maximum amount of RAM you can put in. And it lets you filter on whether it has an optical drive or not. 1) Optical drives it splits into 3 kinds, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, and DVD+/-RW. Isn't any of these good enough for me? I don't copy movies. And I just bought some blank, DVD+R's but I think I can still exchange them. Writeable DVD standards are/were a mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_recordable Nowadays I think all drives can read/write to any media. That's one of the big reasons I asked. I though so too, but of the 11 PCs that are left after I applied a few filters, 8 of them say they have DVD-ROM Here's one of them. It says the same thing in the Overview and in the Specs. This one is $1300 !!!!! The others are cheaper but I can get you folks some urls for them ief you want. https://www.microcenter.com/product/...sktop-computer Is it really read only? Looks like it. It's a slimline model. You know I wouldn't base your decision on a $20 part. Get the machine you want and then add the DVD drive after if you want it. A USB one works just as well. That machine is expensive because of the Quadro card. Each to his own but I would deem that a pretty poor machine for the price, especially an SFF. Can't disagree. A Quadro card is of no use to most people. So is this basically a criticism of the manufacturer, or microcenter? I've presumed the maker sets the wholesale price and vendors mark everything up about the same percentage. So if it's not worth the money, it's not because of microcenter. ????? It's charging what the market will bear. A Geforce and a Quadro can be using *exactly* the same GPU. The Geforce (gamer card), the driver is purposely gimped. If you start Autocad, and put fifty one items in your drawing, suddenly you notice you can't rotate the objects very fast any more. If you switch over to using your Quadro-containing machine, the fifty item drawing is as fast as the fifty one item drawing. Maybe even with ten thousand items in the drawing, it's still as fast as you'd expect. And this is a driver which is not gimped. So you're basically paying extra to be rolled over a barrel and abused. "It would be a shame if something were to happen to the driver on that video card" the two thugs said. "For a small monthly fee, you even get to keep your knee caps". Even in the used market, the Quadro still has value. It has value for the school students who have the student edition of Autocad and are doing course-work. And the course-work would be measurably easier if their Geforce video cards didn't suck at it. But if they price refurbs, they notice that the price is still high, when the Quadro is present. Even if the Quadro is a museum piece. I remember running some OpenGL benchmark, and thinking to myself "how can anyone put up with the molasses speed?". Well, I was testing with a gamer video card of course. I don't know how the driver decides what to do. Whether it just ruins an AutoCad session and leaves your Quake III alone ? There must be a title-specific behavior involved here. Paul |
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#17
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Still shopping, one or two easy questions
micky wrote:
In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 28 Aug 2020 09:06:22 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote: Rene Lamontagne wrote: On 2020-08-27 3:38 p.m., Chris wrote: micky wrote: In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:11:13 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote: On 27 Aug 2020 at 06:20:19 BST, "micky" wrote: I was busy for a while so I'm back to shopping. Microcenter only has branches in 20 cities or so, but their webpage is very good in terms of the detail it gives. For example, they usually? tell you how much RAM it comes with, how many slots for RAM there are, how many are used, and what's the maximum amount of RAM you can put in. And it lets you filter on whether it has an optical drive or not. 1) Optical drives it splits into 3 kinds, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, and DVD+/-RW. Isn't any of these good enough for me? I don't copy movies. And I just bought some blank, DVD+R's but I think I can still exchange them. Writeable DVD standards are/were a mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_recordable Nowadays I think all drives can read/write to any media. That's one of the big reasons I asked. I though so too, but of the 11 PCs that are left after I applied a few filters, 8 of them say they have DVD-ROM Here's one of them. It says the same thing in the Overview and in the Specs. This one is $1300 !!!!! The others are cheaper but I can get you folks some urls for them ief you want. https://www.microcenter.com/product/...sktop-computer Is it really read only? Looks like it. It's a slimline model. You know I wouldn't base your decision on a $20 part. Get the machine you want and then add the DVD drive after if you want it. A USB one works just as well. That machine is expensive because of the Quadro card. Each to his own but I would deem that a pretty poor machine for the price, especially an SFF. Can't disagree. A Quadro card is of no use to most people. So is this basically a criticism of the manufacturer, or microcenter? Neither. You need to have a clearer idea of what you need. It seems you're focusing on the DVD drive, and because they're rare these days you end Up finding esoteric and expensive builds. Firstly set yourself a budget. This is the most important thing. Then set yourself realistic minimum requirements like form factor, RAM, disk space and perhaps CPU but as you're currently using a very old machine any current CPU will blow its socks off. Then add your nice to haves like the DVD drive which aren't critical and can always be added separately. Finally go shopping around to get a short list and weigh up the differences like brand, warranty, delivery options, support etc. Don't be tempted by anything above your budget. There's so much choice you can always find something that matches your needs, even new. I've presumed the maker sets the wholesale price and vendors mark everything up about the same percentage. So if it's not worth the money, it's not because of microcenter. ????? It's not worth the money *for you*. Your needs AFAICT do not require a high end graphics card. |
#18
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Still shopping, one or two easy questions
On 8/28/2020 5:27 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-08-28 5:41 p.m., micky wrote: In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 28 Aug 2020 09:06:22 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote: Rene Lamontagne wrote: On 2020-08-27 3:38 p.m., Chris wrote: micky wrote: In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:11:13 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote: On 27 Aug 2020 at 06:20:19 BST, "micky" wrote: I was busy for a while so I'm back to shopping. Microcenter only has branches in 20 cities or so, but their webpage is very good in terms of the detail it gives. For example, they usually? tell you how much RAM it comes with, how many slots for RAM there are, how many are used, and what's the maximum amount of RAM you can put in. And it lets you filter on whether it has an optical drive or not. 1) Optical drives it splits into 3 kinds, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, and DVD+/-RW. Isn't any of these good enough for me? I don't copy movies. And I just bought some blank, DVD+R's but I think I can still exchange them. Writeable DVD standards are/were a mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_recordable Nowadays I think all drives can read/write to any media. That's one of the big reasons I asked. I though so too, but of the 11 PCs that are left after I applied a few filters, 8 of them say they have DVD-ROM Here's one of them. It says the same thing in the Overview and in the Specs. This one is $1300 !!!!! The others are cheaper but I can get you folks some urls for them ief you want. https://www.microcenter.com/product/...sktop-computer Is it really read only? Looks like it. It's a slimline model. You know I wouldn't base your decision on a $20 part. Get the machine you want and then add the DVD drive after if you want it. A USB one works just as well. That machine is expensive because of the Quadro card. Each to his own but I would deem that a pretty poor machine for the price, especially an SFF. Can't disagree. A Quadro card is of no use to most people. So is this basically a criticism of the manufacturer, or microcenter? I've presumed the maker sets the wholesale price and vendors mark everything up about the same percentage. So if it's not worth the money, it's not because of microcenter. ????? criticism of the machine and the price. as Chris said a quadro card is a poor choice for what you do, The price of it is too high, The SFF is a crappy thing to work on or expand, later if needed. Believe me I have worked on a few and hated them all. If you like Dell go to their site and look around, I'm sure there prices will be better, My first Windows 95 machine was a dell and it was great. Also 2 good places to look at are Amazon and Newegg, both have great machines at good prices. They have a huge variety so you can pick and choose whatever features you want, Delivery is fast and warranty's are good. I don't think anyone has mentioned it, but there's another choice. Instead of buying a brand-name computer, choose the particular components you want and and either build it yourself or have someone build it for you. That has the advantage of letting you choose higher-quality components rather than the lower-quality components with the same specs that Dell, or some other manufacturer, might choose. It has another advantage. It lets you buy and install a retail copy of Windows, rather than getting the OEM copy that comes with pre-built computers. An OEM copy of Windows has a major disadvantage: its license ties it permanently to the first computer it's installed on. It can never be moved to another, and if the computer dies, its Windows license dies with it. If you ever change the motherboard/CPU, Microsoft considers it to be a different computer, and your Windows license dies there too. Building it yourself is easy. It's mostly just a matter of plugging the components together, and isn't much different from plugging together the components of a stereo system. The only major difference is that the computer components are inside a case. The disadvantage of building it yourself is that if something doesn't work, it can hard to figure out what's wrong and also hard to return defective parts. If you have it built for you, it's the builders responsibility to fix it. This alternative can be a little more expensive than a pre-built brand name computer, but it also can be worth the extra cost. -- Ken |
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