OT - What PCs do you use

Hello All,
I was having a debate with a colleague the other day regarding the apparrent proliferation of high powered PCs and Microsofts relentless bombardment of new and "improved" operating systems.
So I was curious...
What sort of PC setup do you guys use at work on a regular basis?
(Be particularly interested to here from our friends in the more 'far-flung' corners of the world.)

Could this be a job for CaseyK ?

I have two PCs at work. One for technical stuff & one I use primarly for administrative stuff.

The PC I do my CAD work on is high end and has no noticeable latency. I havent a clue about it's specs, but it screams.

The other PC (this one) is a 500mz AMD w/XP pro. Good enough for MS Office etc.

I have a notebook that I use for everything. No Desktop. This is what it is:
http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/notebooks/product2.cfm?ProductType=6630&SubType=V

Mostly purchased because of the hardware serial port. Got it w/ 2GB ram since I always have a lot of applications open at a time. Only mistake I made was not noticing that it has the new style PC card slot (Express) and not the older PCMCIA. I had a PCMCIA CF reader I used a bit but now I have to get out the USB card reader if I need it. However, it does have a built in reader for SD cards which is what my Treo 650 phone uses so that is convient.

My old Dell Inspiron 8600 had a higher screen resolution but as I'm getting older, the small text on the higher res screen is getting harder to read anyway.

Overall I'm pleased with it. One other thing is it had special drivers for the touchpad, bluetooth and wireless management. I ended up ditching all of these and letting Windows XP handle the devices. It is much more stable that way.

Nothing special here...

All Gateways.

One 80GB, 500MB RAM for office applications.

One 60GB, 1GB RAM with 22" flatscreen for graphics development.

One M680 laptop for logic and portable applications.

I bought an HP Compaq NW8440 laptop computer 3 months ago, simply because it has a true serial port. I previously had a Dell laptop, but I could not find one that still has a serial port.

I also have a Dell Dimension 3000 desktop computer.

Nothing Special here Either:

2 PC's - P4 3 GHZ, 1GB Ram, 80GB HD.
1 Laptop - Centrino Duo 1.8 Ghz, 1GB Ram, 60GB HD.

And yes they all run windows XP Pro.(I am not gonna rant about it, since its kind of the easiest way to run things, and i guess you do need to choose between reliability and easiness of usage. Its not that unrealiable now is it?)

No, Windows XP is fairly reliable, considering that it has to be so versatile, the "be all and do-all" workhorse. However, if Bill keeps giving away money he will have to raise prices again.

What about Vista? Appears to me it is mostly flash and a fancy virus-protection scheme.

I'd take XP over NT anyday!

Have never touched a MAC though.

Lancie1

Dell does have laptops with serial ports, but they seem to have problems. I'm on my second one in three weeks... pluging anything into the serial port causes the machine to stall and/or crash. They sent me a replacement with the same problem.

I gave up on this and went with the USB-Serial Adapter.

Paulus said:

Could this be a job for CaseyK ?

Click to expand...

Maybe Yes, Maybe No.

We'll see how the comments go.

I have upgraded to a third hand Dell running at 450mhz, from the Gateway at 266.

At Siemens, the had a ton of Dell's, the model was something 260, and they ran a little over two gig in speed, and had a lot of problems.

My GE factory buddies still push Micron or Dell, though they say in the last few years there has been fewer problems with most PC's running the higher end Fanuc software.

I like to tinker, and was warned that Dell has a lot of propriotory sized, and some parts just don't interchange.

My wife just got a new Dell last month, for basic applications, and some issues.

Pretty much, I still thing the better the name, the better off you are. And the more memory.....

512meg bare minimum. With 1 gig at Tiger Direct for $60-$70, no reason not to add more. I think I say 512 on sale for 20-30.

I have a Dell latitude D810, nearly 2 years old now. (Has it been that long?).
Real serial port that works perfectly. It has been a very reliable workhorse.
I keep my old PII laptop just for the DOS/WIN98 apps, but I haven't used it yet.

I have a Dell Latitude D505 with the good old fashioned serial port that is around three years old (I think). It has been dropped a few times and the case is cracked but it still works just fine. That impressed me. Its getting a little slow-ish compared to the newer stuff some of the guys are carrying around but I'm a patient man.

I also have a Dell Dimension 4600 as a desktop. This is what I do most of my day-to-day stuff on.

Keith

Desktop is a Core Duo @ 2.4 with 4g RAM, 320g SATAII mirror RAID hard drives, Gigabyte mother board, 3rd hard drive for ghosting, Dell 30' monitor with an nVidia GeForce 7900GTX video card (Dell had the monitor with the graphics card for free on a web special), external modem with WinFax Pro (fax machine and remote comms to some sites I service), cable broadband, DVD drive etc. High spec machine that goes pretty hard but mirror RAID slows things down a bit. Built to spec job.


A0 plotter, Fuji Xerox 205 (A3 & A4 black & white), Konica Minolta 5430DL (A4 colour).

Drawings, manuals, programming PLCs - SCADA - manipulating graphics etc. Can have 8 or 9 programs open at once and up to 20 drawings.

Laptop is just a pretty plain ordinary HP with a real serial port and 4 Bluetooth serial ports for comms with PLCs as well as a box of cables.

BobB said:

Desktop is a Core Duo @ 2.4 with 4g RAM, 320g SATAII mirror RAID hard drives, Gigabyte mother board, 3rd hard drive for ghosting, Dell 30' monitor with an nVidia GeForce 7900GTX video card (Dell had the monitor with the graphics card for free on a web special), external modem with WinFax Pro (fax machine and remote comms to some sites I service), cable broadband, DVD drive etc. High spec machine that goes pretty hard but mirror RAID slows things down a bit. Built to spec job.


A0 plotter, Fuji Xerox 205 (A3 & A4 black & white), Konica Minolta 5430DL (A4 colour).

Drawings, manuals, programming PLCs - SCADA - manipulating graphics etc. Can have 8 or 9 programs open at once and up to 20 drawings.

Laptop is just a pretty plain ordinary HP with a real serial port and 4 Bluetooth serial ports for comms with PLCs as well as a box of cables.

Click to expand...

Must be nice!! I have this

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=186

But I'm a Old Old Old Pfhaart

WOW Bob!


A 30' monitor?



I could turn my driveway into a drive-in theater with that one.

I wouldn't have to squint to read the fine print on one of those!