What do you consider the best computer for home office/entertainment and the worst?

curiousandsmiley: What do you consider the best computer for home office/entertainment and the worst?
My computer is old and outdated. I need a new desktop for both entertainment, and business purposes. Must be reliable for the long run as it is used daily by 3 people including a kid heavy into gaming.

Answers and Views:

Answer by jeffster301
Dell now owns Alienware

Good to go

Answer by Adam
www.Newegg.com

And building your own is cheaper, better and more powerful along with more possiblitys to upgrade.

Dells and other PC’s alike are very limited to what you can upgrade and the quality of their parts.

www.tomshardware.com and www.anandtech.com have their own build your own PC guides, it’s actually not much harder than Lego’s, but if all else fails Dell is decent.

Get a dual core processor or some kind, atleast a 7600GT and 2 GB of RAM, some would say 1 GB is enough for now, but might as well get 2GB seeing as we’ll be needing it in the near future.

Answer by Luay
If you are looking for a real tough pc … check this one .. it’s a heavy processing machine
https://store.apple.com/us

Answer by Obair
you can never say that this is the best…because its totally dependent of your systems usage….what kind of system do u want?….a gaming one or for multimedia or for office…it depends…..it changes from the point of how you want to utilise it…..

Answer by wd20x2
get an alienware machine, they are great for gaming.

Answer by demaman
Ok, well you probably want to get a PC which will handle Games well. Games and/or movie editing are the most intensive tasks that computer will have to handle. So here are the specs that I would be shooting for

Get Intel Pentium 4 – at least 2.4 GHz processor
1 Gb or RAM atleast
200 GB or more of hard drive space
256 mb of Video Memory – I would go for the ones that either made by NVidia or ATI
DVD-burner is optional.

Do not get a computer with Celeron, those things don’t work as well as Pentiums. They are a cheaper virsion of Pentium, and so don;t work as well. I don’t think they are as fast as pentiums.

Thats probably the computer specs that you might want. This kind of computer will handle games as well as the regular stuff that you might need.

I would not get and HP computer. They are cheap but not reliable. My uncle had an HP couple years ago and the screen died on him. My friend had a laptop and the mouse pad stoped responding. So no HP. Also, I’ve heard bad things about Compaq as well.

I personally would get a Dell, they usually have pretty good deals on computer. Plus they have really good customer support. You might also will have to get a Microsoft Office, unless you already have it, which is really good.

Answer by ballatazzar
Make the switch and get a Macbook, or an iMac.

It will be your entertainment mecca.

If you wish to stick with a PC, I would avoid dell by all means… that is… unless you’ll use it for a paper weight within a year…

Answer by under w0rld
just study on reviews before you purchase,in one of my magazines they where complaing on some of the cheap computers,they where filling with trial products,aol installed,net zero installed,
hp, is a great computer unless you are big into gaming then i would find one with amd chipset,

https://www.newegg.com/
Newegg.com – Buy Computer Parts, Laptop Computers, Digital Cameras, and Electronics

Answer by datadwarf
If you have the money, get an intel iMac 20″.

Partitiion the hard drive, Install Windows on one side, OSX on the other. Surf the web safely on the Mac side. Run the latest games on the Windows side.

itunes and iLife are state-of-the-art entertainment systems.

Apple is known for its high quality and resistance to hacker attacks. Mine has been running non-stop for four years. I’ve added a dvd burner and annother hard drive. I’m happy as a clam.

Answer by bobaf1
Maybe it’s time for two computers. One for the games and one for home/office.

Have the game-er research for his own and the home/office-er research for their own computer.

Or maybe a computer and a laptop.

Answer by [email protected]
If you are going to buy a new computer, get it custom made for what you want to do. Then you will get it with what you need and want. BUYING OFF THE SHELF IS LIKE BUYING A USED CAR You never get alll that you want and then have to buy extra memory, disk space, dvd playersm, cd r/w , ect. I have bought off the shelf and had to spend more money to get the operating system that I wanted
,more memory.. it just was not worth the time to have to
rebuild a new computer. PS you donot get the system disk with most computers so if something happens your stuck buying another operating system disk…..of course the dealers love to work on your machine at $ 40 to $ 100
per hour while training new people

PS I just paided $ 900.00 to have a new computer made to my spects.I have all the system,dvd,cd r/w,program
disk that are on the computer. A comparable off the shelf was going to cost $ 2178.00 without the disks.. The money that I saved is still in the bank. and I have a 2 year full warrenty.