My home computer is five years old, and mastering videos is painfully slow. So it’s time to give it to The Kiddo and buy something new. Here’s the link to what I ordered. A DELL Inspiron 530, Intel quad-core, for $500.
The only upgrade I took was for 3 GB of 800 MHz memory, instead of 667 MHz. This seems to be a rock-bottom price on a pre-made quad-core system. Take note that I ordered it with Windows XP. I first bought XP literally the day it came out, but I have yet to want Vista; which has been out for over a year, and still has driver problems, as well as placing a significant drag on system speed compared to XP.
If this machine has everything I think it’s supposed to have — DVI (rare for integrated video) and two open PCI slots — I’ll be very pleased. If it has only a VGA connector I can live with that, but I won’t be as pleased. Estimated arrival is in about two weeks. I’ll let you know how it looks and works.
Oh. One more thing. XP works with multi-core processors. For licensing, Microsoft counts the number of processor sockets, not the cores. XP Home supports one processor, and XP Pro supports two processors, regardless of the number of processor cores.