Tilt Media Blogspot

I have an old Media Center PC with a Pentium 4 processor running XP. It's the only PC I have at the office and it's getting tired, especially as we ramp up PC encoding tasks. So I went out looking for a replacement.

I got a Costco card recently so while browsing around I saw a pretty good deal on a Dell quad core AMD with 8GB of RAM for about $800 with monitor. I got excited. There were HP and Compaq models that compared to the Dell to choose from as well. They each had slick looking shiny black front panels, but upon closer inspection, I noticed everything was flimsy plastic. Front ports included two USB, a headphone and a mic jack. No firewire. On the back two models had what they call "integrated" graphics. Two of them had a single VGA monitor plug, and since we run two monitors on everything, it was inadequate. It was not clear if any of the models had PCI slots inside to add a video card.

Can you get a quad core PC with 8GB of RAM for under $800. Yes. Will it be flimsy, poorly built and not include a lot of essential options. Yes indeed.

Actually I was quite disappointed. Back home I went online and after about 45 minutes found a decent PC, and with all the options we have come to expect with our Macs, it came to about $2900 with no monitor, comparable to most Mac desktops.

Apple products have always had impeccable build quality. They are solid, well thought out and high quality. Every PC I encountered really felt cheap with profit taking precedence over quality. And even though the $2900 beauty I found online received 4 1/2 stars, users complained of drives that didn't work, bad RAM and other issues. Really? 4 1/2 stars? I didn't buy.

Back at Best Buy the sales guy was having trouble looking up some stats on the AMD versus the new Intel i7 processors online with one of the PC's. "Let's go over to the Macs" he said. Off we went and got the answers we needed. In the end, he convinced me to wait about 2 weeks for the new models loaded with Windows 7 to come out.

I'm guessing more plastic crap.

RJR