My new computer has arrived!
Friday, August 27, 2010 at 11:00PM
Matthew Kopelke in Gadgets

 Source: Dell

Well, the new beast arrived on August 19 as predicted, direct from Dell. In the end, after pondering the 3 options I had in my previous blog post on this matter, I elected to go with Option 1 - a new desktop PC. My logic was that I figured I might as well go for the system that gave me the most bang for my buck, and in all honesty I was quite underwhelmed at the various small laptop options available (most 13" laptops hadn't yet moved to the new Intel CPU architecture), and I didn't want to be stuck with something that was already out of date from the moment I bought it. So going with a fairly high end desktop PC was the right option, I think. Sure, I've lost the portability that I might otherwise have had with a laptop, but at least I know my new PC can pretty much handle any task that I throw at it.

So what did I end up getting? Well, I went with a Dell Inspiron 580 desktop PC, with a Core i5-750 processor at its heart, running at 2.67Ghz (up from a Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz processor). The system shipped with 6GB of DDR3 memory, which is triple what I had on my previous machine. I got a 1TB hard drive included in the machine (up from 160GB in my old machine), and 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card (which is currently one of the best budget 3D graphics cards on the market). The machine even came with a Blu-Ray drive, even though I don't really have any use for one (I don't own any Blu Ray discs, for starters). The best part about the new machine, however, is that it came with a 23" LCD monitor with LED backlighting. To have gone to this from a 17" LCD laptop display has been quite exciting, as I am a sucker for panoramic displays.

So, what does all this mean when it comes down to raw speed? Well, probably the easiest way to compare my new machine with my old one is to use the Windows Experience Index values from both installations to have a rough comparison of the performance on offer here:

2007 Windows Vista 17" Laptop

2010 Windows 7 Dell Inspiron 580

So, as can clearly be seen, the new computer has made quite a leap from what I purchased in 2007 - particularly in the areas of processor, memory, and gaming graphics. While the base scores might be quite close, this is down to a quirk of how Windows calculates the score. Rather than take some kind of average, it uses the principle that your PC is as slow as the weakest component, and in this machine it's the system's desktop performance for Windows Aero. Oh well - I am not going to argue with Microsoft logic. All I know is that the new PC is a heck of a lot speedier than the old one, and that is just from real-world use scenarios. Launching apps is quicker, it can better handle multi-tasking, et al.

So far, the build quality of the machine is quite nice, with a good combination of metal and plastic for the main case. As can be seen in the above pic, the case has some nicely styled images on the front, that don't serve any purpose other than to look nice. The monitor, meanwhile, is a very nice affair indeed, with capacitive touch controls on the lower right side to control the menu items. The picture quality of the display is vibrant, with good colour saturation and excellent viewing angles. Heck, even the cheap keyboard and mouse that came with the machine are quite nice to use, although I cannot see myself using them for more than a few months before I replace them with a more ergonomic set from Microsoft.

It even came with very little in the way of crapware on the machine, although the first thing I did do when I got the machine was scratch the McAfee trial and replace it with the excellent Microsoft Security Essentials.

I only have one real complaint about the unit, and that is it didn't ship with 802.11g/n wireless out of the box. It does come with gigabit Ethernet, but no wifi access. Which seems strange.

So, yes, so far I am quite happy with my new purchase. It's been a joy to finally move full-time onto Windows 7, complete with the new Beta of Windows Live Essentials 2011. But more than anything else, having the extra screen real estate is such a boon. Gotta love a nice big 1080p HD display when video editing in Windows Live Movie Maker, for example. Or editing photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery.

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