Dell XPS 400 series

[Gradation]

Your thoughts? I'm on a tightwad budget, but need to upgrade from my old AMD Thunderbird series. What features of this system do you find favorable or detrimental to DAW applications?

http://www.dell.com/content/products...=19&l=en&s=dhs

[SONICA]

Originally Posted by Gradation

Your thoughts? I'm on a tightwad budget, but need to upgrade from my old AMD Thunderbird series. What features of this system do you find favorable or detrimental to DAW applications?

http://www.dell.com/content/products...=19&l=en&s=dhs

If you go for the base model is OK.

If you start adding all the options you end up with a D940 for $2100.00. At that price range these days you can get at least a D950, 667MHz RAM, three drives, etc.


Best regards,

Guy Cefalu

Sonica Audio Labs

[Empty Planet]

I have one. Think it was around $1200 altogether. Love it. Quiet as a lamb.

As usual with mail order computers, be sure to order a separate disk of XP Pro. You'll want to wipe the drive and reinstall XP to cleanse it of the absurd bloatware.

Then you'll have a sleek, quiet, tasty beast.

Good luck with it.

[Gradation]

Did you upgrade the power supply or any other items? What did they charge for the XP Pro disk?

Thanks!

[theblue1]

I normally favor building box computers (I think "desktop" is a term that's outlived its usefulness but I'm not sure what to call non-laptops at this point)... but I recently picked up a Dell lowballer (in fact a refurb), a 2.8 gHz P4 HT. Originally, I was just going to use it to house a bunch of drives and whatnot -- but it was so surprisingly quiet that I decided to make it my main machine and take some weight off my laptop (a 1.4 gHz PM). [It's one of those Dell boxes with the big hole through it... a very odd looking box but if that's what keeps it cool, so be it. It's no louder than my laptop running with fans at low; but my laptop fan has a nasty habit of kicking into high when the plug count goes up or I'm using photo-editing software -- so the 'desktop' box is actually, overall a much quieter box.]


Anyhow, what I really mean to say here is -- ABSOLUTELY either reinstall Windows from the ground up, clean, or AT LEAST remove the ENORMOUS MOUNTAIN of crapware that Dell overloads their boot profile with. (Apparently, the box vendors take in a LOT of money from outfits like AOL and MacAffee and RealPlayer for junking up your box with come-on-ware, free offers and the like. THEN they compound the problem with a bunch of WORTHLESS proprietary wizards and helpers and... it's just BEYOND ABSURD how mucg GARBAGE comes on a current Dell [or presumably HP, Compaq, etc].

There were SIXTY-SEVEN background processes running on my Dell box when I booted it up. I got rid of FORTY-EIGHT of them just like that (MSConfig, my invaluable pal!) and, whaddya know, it was like getting a MASSIVE PERFORMANCE UPGRADE all for 10 minues of work. (And I could undoubtedly get it farther down, too, but my RAM footprint at bootup is down from around 190 MB as it came to around 120 MB or less, so I'm relatively satisfied. But I may make another trip to TweakXP.com one of these days and strip out a few more processes, just to keep in practice. )

And since most of the new consumer boxes come with Windows Media Center Edition, you need to remove a couple of Media Center 'helper processes' from your boot profile if you're not going to run Media Center [and if you are, I'd recommend a dual boot set up so you can have a properly stripped down set up for audio].


I don't think you should have to go so far as to buy a whole separate non Win MCE version of Windows -- but many of the "reinstall" disks that come with big name boxes are set up to simply reinstall all the crapware as a default. You may have to do a little digging to find the 'plain' Windows installer on the disk.