Rate this comp build

[Odahi]

I spent a fair bit more for my tower, but I had a rather more powerful setup, too. Was running two graphics cards in SLI for a while, then decided to go to a GTX780 with 4GB, to replace the two 550's with 2GB each. (I had had it for a while). Was using an AMD (THE HORROR!) 8350 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and ancillary stuff like that Seidon liquid cooler, then upgraded to the 240mm one. 850w power supply, Samsung 840 Pro 256-GB SSD, blah,blah,blah... Then Mrs. O said, "That armoire takes up too much room in the living room, you should switch to a laptop." Of course, my reply was, "Sure, but $$$" She said, "Go ahead and spend it." SO, in February I got a new laptop... DAMN, I miss my tower.
And this is a NICE laptop. I still miss my tower. My tower was STABLE. Windows 8 sucks balls. Hard.

ETA: That doesn't look bad, but I agree, if you wait a bit you can do quite a bit better for the same money. Good luck with it, I'll be interested to hear what you buy.

[mekender]

My newest hobby has me deeply looking into various websites and other sources that find a ton of big discount items... If I come across a hell of a deal, which I should, I will let you know.

[Draven]

If you hate win 8:

If your PC is compatible with win 7 (i.e. no touch screen) then upgrade to the highest version of win 8... then use the option to downgrade to win 7.

meklender: unfortunately geeks.com is no more.

[Odahi]

I'm a little leery about downgrading to 7, I'm uninformed about the hardware support in 7. My new laptop (as in February 2014 new, probably an October or November 2013 build?) has an mSATA SSD, for one thing, and I'm not sure about some of the other stuff, like vga card, wifi adapter, and blu-ray drive. It's a fairly high-end gaming rig, I'd hate to cripple it, although it's practically a peg-leg now with 8.

[Draven]

mSATA is supported fine under 7. All VGA cards are still supported under 7. M.2 is not supported as a boot device under 7.

[mekender]

If you hate win 8

Then you are going to be pissed when you find out that these newfangled flat, shiny discs have replaced your 8-track deck.

Seriously, if you spend any time on an article about Win 8 and read through the comments, the only thing that anyone bitches about is the start menu/screen... And well, for a major OS revamp, if that is your only complaint, then they did a damn good job.

The fact is, 8 works, it is more secure, more stable, faster, uses less resources and is much easier to install and manage... And the techie features of it are things that us IT guys have been demanding for years.

I am sure some people bitched when slices started appearing in the bread loafs at their local grocery store...

[Draven]

Most workstation users are still using Win 7.

[Steamforger]

I just got my email that my Sager is off the bench and headed to the reseller. This will be a desktop replacement to fit my continuing nomadic lifestyle. I went with 7.

[mekender]

Most workstation users are still using Win 7.

Yup... And a vast number of them are only using 7 because their companies got dragged kicking and screaming out of XP.

I have evolved a bit in my thinking about how businesses use technology over the past few years and have become convinced that as my generation and the generations behind mine start to get into the mid to senior levels of management, the ideas of not changing tech until you are forced to are going to be shifted towards an embracing of technology as it is released so as to figure out how to make it work for your company and get an edge on your competition.

[Draven]

Most workstation users are still using Win 7.

Yup... And a vast number of them are only using 7 because their companies got dragged kicking and screaming out of XP.

I have evolved a bit in my thinking about how businesses use technology over the past few years and have become convinced that as my generation and the generations behind mine start to get into the mid to senior levels of management, the ideas of not changing tech until you are forced to are going to be shifted towards an embracing of technology as it is released so as to figure out how to make it work for your company and get an edge on your competition.

Actually, that depends on the applications they are running. Many workstation apps are Win 7 (and grudgingly support 8) only or 64-bit only now and a lot of them stopped supporting XP64 as soon as it was clear that Win 7 was a viable alternative... and many of them, their recommended system is win 7, not Win 8. (And many stopped officially supporting XP years ago....)