About a week ago I ordered a new computer from Dell, and it arrived on Friday. I was really impressed with how quickly the ordered was processed and delivered. I decided that it was finally time to upgrade, with my computer being five years old. After I graduated from college, my buddy and I put this one (AMD Thunderbird 2.8GHz) together from scratch. It was something I had wanted to do for some time, and it was a great experience, but with prices being what they are today, it almost makes more sense to purchase a pre-built system.
I decided on a midrange system (Dimension E310), sort of a compromise between cost and performance. I figured if I can do fairly comfortably with my current system, that anything newer would be an improvement at this point. The only real upgrade I made to the default configuration was selecting a 19″ flatscreen monitor. I unpacked everything and set it up, and right away I noticed it was faster and quieter. I went through the setup, and Windows finally finished loading.
Soon after that, I got the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). Having been my first startup, I wasn’t thrilled that I was already running into problems. To top it off, there was no indication as to what the conflict might be.
I decided to continue on and install some software anyway and hope that the problem was a freak occurrence. I soon learned that this was not the case as the BSoD kept presenting it self sporadically. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to remove the case and look inside, but I did. Perhaps, because sometimes the BSoD can occur as a result of newly added hardware, among many other possibilities.
At any rate, I looked inside only to realize that there was only one extra PCI slot. Call me naive, but I had no idea that there hardware (sound card, graphics card) was all built into the motherboard. I had planned on swapping out some of the hardware in the new PC with some of the items that I had purchased for my old PC. Specifically, I wanted to put the Firewire card, graphics card, and maybe even sound card in.
So, to make a long story a little shorter, I’m sending it back. The BSoD is not something I should have to contend with on my first startup. It would be one thing if I had added hardware, or even installed something prior to it occurring, but I hadn’t. I do have experience in trying to troubleshoot those pesky stop errors, but quite frankly, I don’t want to spend the time trying to pinpoint the problem (and shouldn’t have to). The other issue being the fact that I can’t really add anything to the prebuilt system, except for the slots allotted for an additional hard drive, cd/dvd rom, floppy drive, and one PCI card. That said, I did really like the 19″ flat screen monitor.
So, now I’m back to square one. I’m thinking of either going somewhere else, perhaps going for a higher-end system, and/or maybe building it myself.
Anyone have any suggestions? Ideally I’d like a system suited for graphics editing, video editing, gaming, etc, with the option to actually switch out and/or add cards, with extra slots for additional memory.
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