Need a new Home Desktop..

[LowDown Hal]

A general all purpose type machine. My only stipulations at this point are that it will be a windows based machine and it should have Blue Ray and an HDMI output.

I've always bought components and built my own machines but I'm thinking of just buying a pre-built this time.

Anyone have experience with an HP Pavilion Elite HPE-240F
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16883147176

or HP Pavilion Elite HPE-210F
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16883147173

Other recommendations in the Windows world?

THANKS

[iamlowsound]

I bought an Acer of some sort last Christmas, it has windows 7, 6 gigs of ram, hdmi, blu ray ect. It has served me well for what it is used for, watching movies and autocad.

lowsound

[MonetBass]

I'm in IT and not a big fan of the HP PCs. Look at Gateway and Dell. Some people will badmouth the Dell line, but working on them for 10+ years have been a largely positive experience.

[jonathan_matos5]

get a mac and bootcamp.

[Kwesi]

Originally Posted by jonathan_matos5

get a mac and bootcamp.

Macs are sweet and they run windows beautifully but this is one instance where I would not recommend it. Mac towers are insanely expensive and imo should not be bought for "general purposes" unless you have money to burn.

[Kipaste]

Originally Posted by Kwesi;9774746 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting**************97747 46******end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Macs are sweet and they run windows beautifully but this is one instance where I would not recommend it. Mac towers are insanely expensive and imo should not be bought for "general purposes" unless you have money to burn.

So why not get a pc that runs snow leopard beautifully for half the money? And then bootcamp windows.. Well, that's not right.
But anyhow, to anyone interested in macs but scared at the prices: hackintosh. You can basically build yourselves a power mac and easily remove the 50% of air in the prices. You get prices, power, tweakability, cheap upgrade possibility of the pc and the stability and ease of a mac.

[mmbongo]

Apple does not support BluRay, so quit talking about Macs.

[crucislancer]

Originally Posted by MonetBass

I'm in IT and not a big fan of the HP PCs. Look at Gateway and Dell. Some people will badmouth the Dell line, but working on them for 10+ years have been a largely positive experience.

We just started using Dells at work, pretty happy with them so far.

Believe it or not, I have a 6 year old eMachines computer at home, and I appear to be the rare person that hasn't had a problem with it. Of course, I'm not the average user and know how to take care of my PC. It's horribly outdated now, and I plan on upgrading at some point in the near future, but have to figure what's more important: Music gear or a new PC.

[MJ5150]

I work in IT. I am very happy with the Gateway SX2800 I bought last year. Quad core, 4GB RAM, Win7, and 640GB hard drive for less than $450 out the door. Mine does not do BluRay, but they might have a model that does.

-Mike

[Kwesi]

Originally Posted by Kipaste

So why not get a pc that runs snow leopard beautifully for half the money? And then bootcamp windows.. Well, that's not right.
But anyhow, to anyone interested in macs but scared at the prices: hackintosh. You can basically build yourselves a power mac and easily remove the 50% of air in the prices. You get prices, power, tweakability, cheap upgrade possibility of the pc and the stability and ease of a mac.

That's something I've been seriously interested in for a while because I know at some point I'll want a Tower and I'll want Snow Leopard on it but I can't go and drop $3000 on computer like that.

[DigMe]

The BEST bang-for-buck desktops that I have found anywhere are from www.cyberpowerpc.com

I always recommend them to people who don't want to build. You can often add up the cost of identical parts of one of their PCs and the cost of parts alone comes out very close to the same or occasionally Cyberpower is cheaper (if you were starting from scratch with no parts or OS). They do good work too.

bc