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* Antwort auf eine Nachricht von Corky00 an All am 21.07.95
CC> I'm shopping for my first PC, being a long-term Mac user, and
CC> would like
CC> to hear from any and all of you what you'd recommend in a nice
CC> system for my home office.
Generally, it's not the best time to buy a PC right now, as Windows 95 is due
Really Soon Now. So I would delay the decision two months or so, as nearly
every Pc comes bundled with lots of software. Or, at least here in Germany,
you get software much cheaper when you buy it together with a new machine.
Simply put: Buy the software, get the hardware for free :-)
CC> I'll need a big color monitor and lots of power for doing
CC> technical documentation.
"Technical documentation" is a broad area. E.g., I mostly write manuals, but
do very limited DTP work. That not only suits my skills, but helps to deliver
the data format the customer wants: Who can be productive in Pagemaker AND
Ventura Publisher AND Interleaf AND QuarkXpress AND ... ?
For my kind of work, I prefer b/w monitors. Not because they are cheaper, they
are really hard to get anyway, but because I prefer them technically: No
colored dots all over the screen. Presently I use a 17" Eizo Flexscan 5500
(long out of production, I assume).
CC> Wanna' get a cd-rom and lots of room for expansion.
A CD-ROM drive is cheap and needed: Many programs are delivered on CD-ROM. But
why room for expansion? You can easily add another 16 MB of RAM or another
card. Five or six drive bays are a good idea, too. But when your processor
gets
to slow in a year or two, you simply swap the motherboard or buy another PC.
If you want to know the state of the art or what's hot at the moment, you can
do much worse than read PC Magazine. They do LOTS of product tests, e.g., the
annual "printer blockbuster", where they test more than 100 printers for a
single issue.
CC> What do you have that you love? What should I avoid?
First, I would try to get hold of a PC literate. Buy him/her a beer ot two,
invite him for dinner, even pay him money. There will be something of a
culture shock for you. A good place to find this kind of people could be a
local BBS. If you need a few numbers of such systems, simply write me e-mail
with the prefixes of your local calling area.
CC> Do any of you use a Notebook?
I don't, because I hardly need a PC outside. The biggest screens of laptops
are some 10" with 800x600 pixels. On a desktop system, you would use no less
than three times that much real estate and no less than 1024x768 pixels. You
cannot expand a notebook easily, so you'd have to pay to premiums at the same
time: One for the priviledge of a notebook and another for that "extra room"
you talked about.
Greetings from Germany,
Alexander
--
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