Ask the Computer guru a question

I'd say that's plenty for your needs.

I'd say he knows enough. "dual core pentium" is one step back from state of the art "Core Duo" -- the order of the words is significant -- but for ordinary home use like yours, more than sufficient.

The 4GB RAM is Vista-induced hardware bloat, Win7 will be more than happy with that amount. I've now gotten some first-hand good reviews from Win7 users.

The only thing I'd add: investigate Firefox for web browsing and OpenOffice for (zero-cost) office suite/writing/spredsheet/database, fully compatible with existing Word documents.

Find out if it is upgradeable... Right now it seems adequate, but your hard drive might be a tad small in two-three years, and laptop computers are more finicky (and more limited) when upgrading. It also sounds like it has integrated graphics rather than a graphics card. If you do a lot of graphics this may not be what you need. From your description this sounds as if it is okay though.

Performance-wise, it'll be fine. RAM and disk are more than adequate.
It comes with Internet Explorer v8, which should take care of most of your Web browsing, although it would be good if you were to download, install and use Firefox instead.

One possible issue is that your current copy of Photoshop might or might not be usable. I have no experience with that to know. Turbotax will need to be updated, as usual. DVD movies should play.

I love OpenOffice. One caveat though: while the WP and spreadsheets are very similar to MS Word and Excel, OpenOffice Base != Microsoft Access.

But since I don't have much call to use a database, it's not a concern to me.

Thanks for all the advice/ help. All going well I'll stop in and buy it on the 21st.

re- open office- can't see concerns there as I don't do fancy report type projects
re- photoshop- I'm hinting rather strongly to Mom that I want the latest edition. Mine came out around 2005!!!

I stopped at walmart Sunday and they had in their newest compys up on shelves to play with and the media program for music seemed soooo nice. This was with Win7. Seemed very easy to handle.

Well-

One week to go to a new computer. I've been spending lots of time loading my books and music ect onto cds. I also found out that AOL has to send me a startup cd that works with WIN7- which they have sent to me.

AND--- drum roll please--- I finally- after 5 long hrs googling and hunting figured out how to change my AOL account from the premium down to the basic for 9.95 a month. And as some of you know, I've begun changing my email address over to Yahoo.

I've been told that I might be lucky enough to pick up someone's wifi signal and I can use that. We'll see.

Sunday I'll go back to Costco and do some more drooling over the comps.

Especially over that 17 inch that I REALLY want.

hey guru d00d ...

my sound's been f**ked to the moon in WinXP. The strange thing is that it still makes the system sounds. But I can't get sound on YouTube or in any media player.

I'm using the integrated "SoundMax" audio on my motherboard, with the most current drivers I could find. All the devices show in the Device Manager as "working properly" but in the "Sounds and Audio Devices" section of the Control Panel, it says "No Audio Device" is installed.

When I go to "Add/Remove Programs" and click either "change" or "remove" on the SoundMax software, it begins the setup program, and then pops up the dialog:

Well, I've done that repeatedly and the same goddamn thing keeps happening! WTF?

[edit]
went back to Device Damager and removed every sound device I could, then restarted. Seems to be working now. Off to YouTube to watch a Stick video for test.

Well, if that hadn't worked, I would have suggested getting the Win32 codec pack from the generically-named but quite legitimate codecs dot com, which I also like to tout for their Real ALternative and Quicktime Alternative media players.

I find it hard to see how that relates to my issue, but I'll give it a try -- because restarting my system caused the problem to reoccur, and I had to patch it up the same way I did before, which will get tiresome in a hurry if I have to do that every time the machine gets rebooted.

I suggested it because I'm not 100% convinced its a driver issue. The basic sound equipment works, as you get system sounds. So, it's got to be the web interface -- which is where codecs come in. I forget if you prefer IE OR FF. The codec solution covers Windows in general and IE, if you use FF, you may need to update the program itself (current version At This Writing is 3.5.5) or the audio/video handling plugins (check them by typing "about:plugins" in your address bar). Other things that may need manual updating are Flash (ATW v.10.0.32.18) and Java (ATW v.6u17)

That makes sense, up to a point ... but again, even Windows Control Panel says "no audio device" installed, despite showing all the devices in Device Damager. Anyway, I'll give it a try.

BTW, forgot to mention ... Before initially posting here, I looked up "Windows Audio Service" and found a page on enabling it; it said to run "services.msc" and make sure to enable Plug & Play so that Windows Audio Service will also enable. Well, I did that, and both are already enabled without me having to do anything, and the problem with trying to uninstall SoundMax persists.

D'oh, I just thought of one more place to check. Next time you restart your computer, hit DEL/F1/F2/whatever to get into your BIOS screen, and make sure your onboard sound card is enabled there.