Ew Dell. lol

but cool that's good to hear.

Everyone hates one brand or another. Funny enough, a friend of mine heard it was a Dell, and his reaction was "Oh, good! Excellent choice." Everyone has their horror stories for one brand or another. I'm just happy to have a working PC that's about 6x better than my old one in just about every way imaginable. Speed, storage, memory, the works.

lol yeah. I don't really care about brand so much unless it's Toshiba or HP, they're known for crap PCs and laptops. My last one was a no name from Fry's which lasted 7 years and I built this one, twas a lot of fun :3

Yeah, Dell at least is one of those brands where the people who do hate it can't agree on what would be better and why. Unlike HP where everyone agrees that ANYTHING would be better. :P

Well Dells used to be total crap like HP, but I give it to them for stepping it up over the pas couple years, though their baseline units still drag

Yay, glad to see you with a good arting machine!

So what kind is it exactly? I work with these on a daily basis so....yea...

Dell Inspiron. Read: CHEAP.

You get what you pay for.

That said, backup everything constantly. Odds are pretty good something will die within a year. If you're lucky it'll only be the optical drive.

Suggestion for a good backup service? I don't trust physical drives. They get lost around here. I have an external drive sans power cable and a USB drive that's the only one we can find out of 5.

There's places where you can back up online for free. Despite my harddrive dying within 2 years of getting my Macbook Pro, and talking to someone about online back-up sites, I have yet to actually do it. I'm too dependent on my damn computer access, lol. It takes a day or so ( as I was told ) to back up the data the first time. After that, it just backs up the new/edited documents. :)

I have yet to use online services, so I don't know the answer to that question.

Congratulations, K'Sharra.

I am glad that you finally got a new PC I hope it works well for you for a long time I also hope you have a happy holiday season as well hun ^^

Glad to hear everything arrived alright. :3 *tailswish*

Never had a problem with Dell. And they do tend to be faster than they promise with shipping.

Sometimes Dell will provide the first year of their own online backup service for free (look at your invoice to see). I've had excellent results with Mozy, though their free service is limited to 2GB, hardly enough for archiving art. Whatever you do, some sort of automated backup is a must because with computers it's just a matter of "when" something is going to fail...and hardware is cheap compared to lost data

I recommend in the future teaching yourself how to build a PC; you'll save a significant amount of money by buying parts off of Newegg, and you can teach yourself how to do it in about 8-9 hours of reading (most of that time is just reading articles on what the best manufacturers are/what the most powerful video card for your budget is, etc).

Tom's Hardware is a great place for comparison charts and the like, and you can google for specific information. The parts you'd need to build a PC are: Case, Power Supply (PSU), Motherboard (Mobo), Processor (CPU), RAM, Video Card (GPU), Hard Drive (Optional Solid State Drive in parrallel for the Operating System), Optical Drive. If you are not comfortable overclocking, the factory heat sink from either AMD or Intel is more than enough cooling these days, and will come pre-coated with a layer of thermal paste making your life even easier. These days they've standardized a lot, so you it's much harder to mess up and buy parts that don't go with eachother. Basically if you buy AMD, almost any motherboard from AM2, AM2+ or AM3 will work, and with Intel if you buy an i5 or an i7 it will determine your motherboard. Ram is pretty simple now adays and you just need to make sure your motherboard supports DDR2 or DDR3. Beyond this it's just buying a large enough case to house your parts, and making sure you don't buy two video cards to go with a mini-ATX sized Mobo or anything silly like that.

The stock CPU/heatsink paste is awful and much too thick. You can get more life and some overclocking just by spending a few bucks on Arctic Silver.

Last I heard, this admittedly was a few years ago, Tom's did not do proper testing of PSU's. Their reviewers just plug things in and see if it'll handle the load. The site is okay for some broad comparisons that anyone could do with some commonly found software testers, but I wouldn't use it as a one-stop shop.

Actually, this is my first pre-made computer since I was 10. I've been building my own computers for about 12 years now. The reason I went with a pre-made this time around was because it was cheaper and faster. I'm very familiar with the parts and workings of computers, and in fact, the first thing I did on it arriving was crack it open and give it a few minor upgrades.

Good, good; Dell is generally extremely overpriced for anything involving decent parts; and you have no control over the quality of the PSU/RAM/etc.