Computer purchase waffling

[valis2]

So. Many of you know that I am unnaturally attached to my beautiful amazing giant Dell XPS computer. It is huge and noisy and I absolutely adore it.

Sadly, I purchased it in October 2003, and I am finally beginning to have issues with keeping up with things. Don't get me wrong, I am still spoiled by it. I can play WMP, edit up to 50 photos at a time in PS Elements, have 40 tabs open in Firefox, be working on a 200 page Word document, chat using Trillian, work on eBay listings using TurboLister, and have a scan running, all at the same time. However, if I try to edit more than 50 pics, PSE crashes, and with Firefox's recent memory hogging ridiculousness, it's getting to be a bit of a pain.

See, I got super lucky when I bought this system. I bought it as Windows XP was coming out, and therefore it has had a stable OS for a very long time. Now that 7 seems stable, I am wanting to get a new system now and enjoy another long stretch of stable OS happiness with a new computer. Even though my XPS is adequate (and sometimes more than adequate), it's starting to show its age. Still, seven years is a great run for a computer. I've added RAM and put in a new vid card, but other than that it's still as I bought it.

So here is my waffling issue. I can purchase one of two computers. One is the last gasp of the Dell XPS 9000; I believe this is the last weekend it's available, and it's discounted. The other is the new model, the XPS 9100.

Here are the stats for the 9100 I'm interested in:

PROCESSORS Intel® Core™i7-960 processor(8MB L2 Cache, 3.20GHz)
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
MEMORY 12GB Tri Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz - 6 DIMMs
MONITOR 24.0" Dell ST2410 Full HD Monitor with VGA cable
VIDEO CARD ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5
HARD DRIVE 1TB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
OPTICAL DRIVE Dual Drive:Blu-ray 6X Combo Drive and 16X DVD+/-RW w/double layer write capability
WIRELESS Dell 1525 Wireless-N PCIe Card
SOUND CARD THX® TruStudio PC™
WARRANTY AND SERVICE 2 Year Basic Service Plan
OFFICE SOFTWARE Microsoft® Office Home and Business 2010

9000:

PROCESSORS Intel® Core™ i7-960 processor(8MB L3 Cache, 3.2GHz)
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
MEMORY 12GB Tri-Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz - 6 DIMMs
HARD DRIVE 1TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive
VIDEO CARD ATI Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3
MONITOR 24.0" Dell ST2410 Full HD Monitor with VGA cable
OPTICAL DRIVE Dual Drives: Blu-ray Disc (BD) Combo (BD-ROM; DVD/CD Burner) and DVD+/-RW
SOUND CARD Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio edit
WIRELESS Dell 1525 Wireless-N PCIe Card
WARRANTY AND SERVICE 2 Year Basic Service Plan
OFFICE SOFTWARE Microsoft® Office Home and Business 2010

The differences that I can see immediately? The 9100 has higher speed RAM, a better Blu-ray player, and a slightly better vid card. The price is about $300 more for the 9100. So do I try to save money, or will that limit my computer's years of usefulness? I'm slightly more concerned with how long I'll be able to use the computer over price.

Any opinions would be awesome.

Comments

[cantabile.livejournal.com]

I have to hold my hands up to not knowing much about computers, other than that I like to use them, however ... if $300 isn't a big percentage of the total price of either I'd tend to spend it. Faster is better, isn't it?!

[florahart]

For point of comparison, the computer I'm using has a 20GB HD, 512MB RAM, no functioning optical drive, a Celeron 1.4GHz processor, I have no idea what for sound or video cards, and a 15-inch not-flatscreen definitely not-HD monitor. Won't run XP at all; is currently running Lubuntu with OO3 and Chrome.

So, either of these sounds like not at all the same beast (possibly not the same kingdom) to me. :D

The other difference I see, though, is in the sound card; does integrated mean it's sharing the RAM? It does with a video card, I think, and that makes the slightly slower speed more slower, yes? *shrug* Oh, and does the blu-ray dual-layer write capability mean you could burn to blu-ray?

[ook.livejournal.com]

Did you check the Dell Outlet online store? You can buy older (and newer) models there at a discounted price. Go for the ones that are "scratch 'n' dent" rather than refurbished. Refurbs might possibly have problems that were never fixed. A scratch 'n' dent is usually just old stock or something with a cosmetic defect. Many of the computers were special orders that were cancelled by the buyers (for a restocking fee) so many of them have more RAM or extras not included on the basic configurations.

Be warned that on specific colors, you might get a different color (I was supposed to get a black Dell desktop but the color turned out to be brushed aluminum, which I actually liked better).

[ishie]

This is nothing to do with the computer purchase (I used to know such things!) but you can limit Firefox's RAM usage with a pretty simple fix: http://www.lifespy.com/2007/firefox-quick-tip-limit-ram-usage/

Had to do it on my own 7 year old Dell a few months ago and it's amazing what a difference it made.

[greenpear.livejournal.com]

Go for as much as you can afford. If you don't you'll kick yourself in the ass later. My new MacBook Pro has exactly what I wanted even though I did spend more than I wanted. But I learned over the years if you go for saving money now you'll regret it later on...

[innerslytherin]

I say spend the extra money now. I did that when I bought my last Dell laptop, and I never ever regretted spending that money, even though I made the ultimate decision to go back to using a desktop (I can build a desktop from the ground up, but I'm not much good at working on laptop hardware, aside from adding RAM).