6 replies to this topic

[raymac46]

I have finally decided to retire my 7 year old Dell Optiplex 620 box, and I got a nice deal from a local small computer shop on an Acer Veriton business PC. It has an Intel i5 quad core, 1 TB drive, DVD--RAM, Windows 7 Pro and Intel graphics. A sturdy looking mini tower, not fancy but it'll do the job. We are not gamers here so the Intel integrated graphics wil be fine. I can always put in a PCI-e graphics card later if I want to.
It has a DVI output so I hooked it up to my Acer 22 inch monitor and it looks great. Very quiet and powerful. The Optiplex will eventually become a Linux only system.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Nice. Don't be so fast to dump that Win 7. It's a very nice MS OS this time around, in my not-an-MS-fan opinion.

[crp]

dual boot the linux and W7, especially if the W7 was an OEM from Dell.

[raymac46]

No the Optiplex has XP Pro. Not enough resources for Vista/Win 7. For now I'll keep the XP/Linux dual boot that is currently on it and mothball it. It could be used in a pinch.
One of my concerns was that support for XP will go away in a couple of years and by then we'd be on to Windows 8. I'd prefer to go long term with Windows 7, hence the switch now rather than in a year or so.
Certainly it is a lot easier to migrate to a new machine than before. All my data was backed up on an external drive, so I just copied it back to the new HDD. You can back up profiles to Thunderbird and Firefox so I did that and restored everything into the new installations. I needed a new copy of my photo management program and my electronic checkbook but that was it. That and dumping some bloatware and I was good to go. Everything passed inspection when my wife ran things today.

[raymac46]

Well, after working with older hardware it is nice to occasionally get something newer - a real luxury I'd say. The Acer obviously loads and runs things faster but the main advantage is - it's quiet.
The Optiplex 620 I have features a Pentium D 840 - one of Intel's first attempts to make a dual core processor. It's a big chip with a pretty high clock speed and it generates lots of heat (TDP 130 watts.) So even a simple Youtube video or virus scan will soon get the cooling fans spooling up to the point where the box sounds like a 737 taking off. The i5 has twice as many cores, 7X the power and uses about 40% less electricity. Not to mention the quiet cooling.

[ross549]

Yep, the core chips are quite nice.

Adam

[LilBambi]

Nice