Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Microsoft themselves have the ISOs available for download from their own 'Digital River' site, and the links are pretty easy to find through a Google search. I think technically those ISOs are intended for some sort of student deal rather than public consumption, so downloading them for some other purpose might be a bit of a legal grey-area.

Over here in Australia most students (I'm on currently) purchased this version. It's an upgrade version of W7 Pro and was selling for AUD 49. You can also purchase Office Pro for AUD 99.

You can download the 32 and 64 bit media as ISO files and burn them onto discs. Deleting a certain file (ei.cfg) brings back that menu where you can choose the W7 edition (You know starter, home basic, professional and all of that).

You can also easily make a USB boot stick. Jus copy all the files onto the USB and then use the DISKPART command line tool to make the partition on the USB drive active.

I used this disk to do a clean install on my notebooks and netbooks. You will have to call Microsoft, which just takes a few minutes, but then you have a clean machine with no bloat ware.

As mentioned, burn your recovery media on day one. Every day people post in forums that they "tried Ubuntu" and want to get their windows back 🤣

Some netbooks don't give you an option to burn media (my current Acer does though, I just used a USB DVDRW), so in these cases just image or clone the HDD.

Building: I'm torn on this one. For myself it's not an issue, but for friends and family, I do recommend what parts they pick, but push them to have the store put it all together so if they are issues with the computer they can just take it back to the shop and not hassle me 🤣

Paddan1000 wrote:

I was mostly speaking from my experiences with my dad's 6 years old Compaq Presario, which happens to be the worst computer I've ever seen. The specifications are all right for it's time, but they cut corners in every way imaginable.

I had a Presario that dated back to about 2007 that behaved itself quite nicely, actually – at least until I tried to upgrade the processor to a Presler Pentium D, which really doesn't seem to be a particularly recommended option for anyone. Yes, they chose a pretty strange option for the cooler (I think it was actually a rebranded ASUS model), but it was a legitimate one nonetheless. Yes, the initial Vista install had some crap with it, but I was able to get XP up and running easily enough with the drivers from the website; come to think of it, ATI's own drivers worked fine for the chipset and onboard video.

And I also bought a replacement PSU for a case once in which all the holes lined up just fine, but the PSU wouldn't fit because the outlet for the power cable was too close to the edge of the PSU. I call that a problem with the standard, not with the case. 😉

Just about every other component is OEM with proprietary drivers that makes it hard to fit them in another system and lowers their second-hand value if I were to sell them after an upgrade.

These days the components requiring drivers that aren't on-board aren't likely to have any kind of substantial resale value even if you buy them separately.

Thanks for all the replies here! I wasn't checking it because it says zero replies in the forum. What is up with that?

My impression of pre-built PCs came from trying to replace a hard drive in a Compaq pentium-90. Turned out the ROM actually resided on a proprietary partition on the hard drive. There was no way that we could ever see to actually replace it.

I do realize you have to know something about what you are doing. This same friend got a PC-Chips TXPro motherboard - he was told it was an Intel TX chipset - either the vendor didn't know what he was doing or was lying through his teeth.

If you look at a lot of store-bought computers, they do not seem to be built with upgrading in mind.

ncmark wrote:

Thanks for all the replies here! I wasn't checking it because it says zero replies in the forum. What is up with that? […]
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Thanks for all the replies here! I wasn't checking it because it says zero replies in the forum. What is up with that?

My impression of pre-built PCs came from trying to replace a hard drive in a Compaq pentium-90. Turned out the ROM actually resided on a proprietary partition on the hard drive. There was no way that we could ever see to actually replace it.

I do realize you have to know something about what you are doing. This same friend got a PC-Chips TXPro motherboard - he was told it was an Intel TX chipset - either the vendor didn't know what he was doing or was lying through his teeth.

If you look at a lot of store-bought computers, they do not seem to be built with upgrading in mind.

Some are upgradeable, but even if they tell you what is in them, they don't tell you what is missing!

A friend bought a brand new clone Quad Core (Q6600-something) and he was so proud of it! Everything ran just great (and that's true)!
It had an Intel quad core, 2 gigs of RAM, top range graphics card (8800GTS or GTZ, can't remember. It was the 320MB one), 320GB-ish harddrive. Pretty good huh?

But what they didn't tell him was this:
*It had no case fan!
*His 2GB memory was 2*1GB 667 DDR2 of the cheapest kind
*It had a 350W PSU!! The only reason it hold out was because it was a FSP PSU....till his rig because dusty!

Dust in the HSF, CPU overheating constantly (always a prob with those little stock ones).
Dust in the PSU
Dust on his graphics card
Because of no case fan, all the dust accumulated in the HSF and the PSU, both were already stressed to their limits.

In the end he thought he had bought a €1600 rig for the future, only to spend another €450+ in upgrades and repairs.

I ended up replacing his PSU to a 600W OCZ, added a 12cm case fan and did a couple clean jobs till I tought him how to do it himself.
His motherboard got replaced once because it broke and recently he upgraded to 2*2GB DDR2-800 and half a year ago went 1TB, exactly the upgrades I adviced him to do in the first place.

Now his rig had a new life while the upgrades I advised him were pretty low cost (just the extra memory, he took out the crappy old modules, and the harddrive. The other parts were more about fixing the errors of the previous builders of that rig.

This also is part of the risk of buying pre-build.

I've had plenty of OEM PCs- Dells, HPs and IBM P3s and P4s. For the most part they were pretty good and reliable. And upgrading them was fun even though can't overclock or anything on them.

My trusty old IBM 300PL with a 450mhz Katmai, 64mb ram, 13gb deskstar and 4mb onboard graphics received by the end of it's life a 1ghz Coppermine on a MS6905 slotket (effective 750mhz cause of the 100mhz bus), 768mb ram, a geforce 6200 card, and a WD 40gb 7200rpm hard disk. All running Xp Pro SP2 beautifully- could even play NFS: Underground on it at 1024x768 at high settings! Gave it to my mum who used it for a year before the disk died and then I scrapped the lot and built her a modern Phenom system for her b'day.

Btw, good replies about Vista/7 working with royalty OEM keys. Cheers for the correction, I learned a new thing again! 😁

I don't see why Microsoft would allow you to activate with an OEM key. OEM licenses are cheap, MS only gets paid like $25 each for them in bulk so they would be stupid to allow you to use them to activate any other version of Windows.

sliderider wrote:

I don't see why Microsoft would allow you to activate with an OEM key. OEM licenses are cheap, MS only gets paid like $25 each for them in bulk so they would be stupid to allow you to use them to activate any other version of Windows.

Dunno, but if they do, I won't be complaining 😉

I've never bought a pre-built rig (other than the ones that were given to me for free) until my current one. I was lazy at the time and didn't want to take any time researching which the best component is for the money, blah blah blah. Luckily this one was built using off-the-shelf components (and not proprietary ones), including an ASUS motherboard, NEC DVD-RW, WD hard drive, etc.; the specs were all given to me beforehand. So I knew that I could easily upgrade the machine in the future if needed. If I had bought the components individually the entire price of the PC may have come out to roughly the same price as the pre-made machine. And definitely wasn't from one of those big megacorps like Dell either. Bottom line, if you really want to buy one and customize it, knowing what you're getting first is key.