Appraisers' Free Forum

Last time I spent a lot of money and bought the latest, greatest machine I could find. That was about 8 years ago and I think that the strategy paid off. I'm still using that machine and haven't had much down time, training expense, or new software expense since.

However, this time, I decided on a different strategy. Seems like most of the dual core machines have pretty similar stats... so, other than going for a large hard drive, I wanted the cheapest machine with a decent sized screen I could find. And, with one other requirement... it had to have XP Pro.

For laptops, the choices are beginning to be far and few between. I settled on a Compac. I'll let you know later how this works out.

For those of you needing to buy and wanting XP, the time is running out. Supposedly, MS won't allow new XP sales after June. But, here's a story that might prove that info wrong:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2293682,00.asp

I stopped buying high end machines about 6 years ago. We buy a new computer about every 2-3 years. It is worth the money to have the latest and fastest equipment.

I also went away from mail order and rather buy at the local Staples or so. The last machines we bought (my wife has a CPA office and my appraisal office) have all been lap tops. Had wonderful results with HP and Compaq, now have also a couple of ACER and Toshiba.

My personal lap top was on ACER for $549 with dual core intel, 17 inch monitor, 2GB ram and 160 GB storage. It does have Vista as we are switching everything to Vista. And for me it works great.

I will no longer have a Dell as my last three I bought came out of the box not working. Sending them back to Dell left me without a puter for close to two weeks. Not acceptable in my opinion. On top of that, the store bought machine provide for less price more features than the custom machine.

The last two dell desktops we bought we had to rebuild. The last notebook we bought from them we have sent back 3 times. We figured it was worth it when the machine sold for $2500. Since then we have bought local big box store machines and have had few problems. We use them in the field, so we are rough on them. The Dell never did hold up, the Acers, Toshibas, and Compacs, all under $550, work great.

The last time I bought an Acer, I went through 3 in 2 weeks. Canceled the purchase, and bought 2 Dells... haven't had a problem since.

I like Toshiba. Acer? Gah.

Had a Win98 Acer machine several years ago; it was a dog that never seemed to live up to its spec sheet.

My current machine is a Dell Latitude I bought with XP Pro last November with my 12% NAR discount. No problems at all.