New Computer

Ok, come the new year I'm going to assemble a new PC. Not because I need it but because I want it. So far I'm narrowing down to about $2,500 Canadian with:
Corsair 800D case
Intel i7 920
Asus P6T MBoard
6 or 8 G of DDR3 memory but I'm confused about the widely varying prices and specs
Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Radeon 5850 Video Card
plus other stuff of course.I think I'll (just because friends want me to) look at a Mac in this price range but the last time I looked it was silly.Any thoughts, commments, sales pitches?Price isn't directly an object but bang for buck is. There is no way I'll go to the bleeding edge with the hardware. I do not run games; the only thing that drives it is some video burning and running adobe piggy products (part of the reason for 64 bit)

That's like 200 USD right?What in the world would you need 8 g of memory for?Anyway, what you have there seems pretty decent to me. Go for it. Just wait a couple more days for win 7 to come out. Vista is a piece of crap. I've been using win 7 rc the last few months and I'm growing quite addicted to it.By the way, you really need the ultimate version? From what I've read about it, home premium works just as good with what you claim to plan to do with it. Or may be you're a world class hacker posing as some random Canadian.

Buy a Mac dude, buy an f'n Mac.If price isn't directly an object then the most for your dollar is a Mac.- Oni

I'll be attempting to wait till the new year and try to keep waiting while watching prices. I'd expect to see a 6 core i7 pretty soon which should drive the 920 price down.As for the Mac: I'll take my 2500 worth of specs in and see what I get with the Mac.As for the exchange rate: we are darned near par again. 0.96 today.

I must have about 100 pieces of XP software to run. The XP in the ultimate version gives me assurance that I'll be able to move them over.

I must have about 1000 xp softwares and so far I have yet to find any compatibility issue with win 7.Just make sure you get a computer that has a cpu that supports virtual.

You may have just saved me a $100 (however much or little that exhanges into).

Make sure all of your software is 64 bit.

There is enough that the chances of that are close to zero.What if it isn't?

Here's a good article on why. Basically it knocks out all of the advantages of a 64 bit system on that piece of software. I'd just run two PCs for a while till the 64 bit version of the software becomes available and gets installed on the new machine.

They just came out with some new upgrades today.At least check them out.We have over a dozen Macs in the office and more at home; only one is within a couple of years new. My main one, on which I prepare a lot of books, is close to ten years old. Most of the others are pretty near that age. The darn things just keep on tickin'!One of the factors in how "expensive" a computer is is how long it will last. Macs have a good track record.(Truth in advertising: we recently had a motherboard failure on a Macbook Pro portable, probably about 4 years old. That's the first catastrophic failure I remember in 25 years of owning Macs.)

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Don't sweat over it. Your 32 bit software will run just fine on your 64 bit machine. I highly recommend getting win 7 64 bit. The articles that tell you dire consequences of running 32 bit software in 64 bit system are written by sensationalists. You're really not going to notice any difference with what you do.

I'd advise you to be quite careful about assuming that XP compatibility mode will solve any portability issues.Doing a quick google I find:1. Compatibility mode requires hardware virtualisation support. You had better get the right processor (some have it, some don't and the only way to find out is to check the specs.) Apparently you may also have to go into the BIOS settings to enable it.2. There's some advice and instructions here that are probably worth reading. I doubt that you will want to run old antivirus programs, but you shouldn't run old disk utilities or similar programs either.3. This review of the beta is not too promising Better hope that the final version is better.

If you're buying offline (in-person) I recommend any local small-computer-shop in your area. Such places tend to have good prices.If you're buying online, one of the best Canadian sites to use is TigerDirect.ca. You can get packages there (new or refurbished) or buy the pieces and put it together yourself.
It's also good for all sorts of other electronic gadgets at low prices....that's all the help I have

I don't know that I have the courage to switch to Mac myself, I take advantage of so many pieces of different software that I'm sure a significant subset either isn't available on Mac or doesn't behave quite the same or would have to be repurchased, plus Mac doesn't have X-Mouse, but when my wife's 2nd laptop PC failed we switched her over to Mac. She doesn't do software development on her home machine like I do, so all she needed was email, iTunes and web access.But the Mac came with surprises. I think for $1800 we got a 21.5" monitor with everything built into the monitor case. The CPU is a 3.0GHz Itel Core 2 Duo CPU. There's 4GB memory expandable to 16GB. Disk is 500GB. Graphics is NVidia GeForce 9400M with 256MB.And there were other suprises. The terminal window is Unix. Useful programs like Perl are included, and Apache is installed and always running by default.If it weren't for the lack of X-Mouse...--Percy