global risk appetite wrote:
I'm interested in buying a Dell XPS Studio with 6mb ram, 500GB hard
drive. I plan on using the computer for both work (heavy spreadsheet
and powerpoint), multimedia (mpeg/wmv/flv), Internet surfing, some
games (this is secondary), etc.

Should I wait until September and bypass Vista? Or should I buy one
now, get the one with Vista, and upgrade when Windows 7 is released?

I've never worked with Vista but am very wary of its problems. I use
Windows XP and exclusively Windows 2003 Office. So I'm used to a very
stable environment! But my 4-year old computer (Dell Dimension 4700
with Pentium 4 CPU, 500mb RAM, and 75gb HD) just isn't cutting it any
more. It's really bogging me down.

What say you?

Why not upgrade the memory in your Dimension 4700? With only 512MB, it
is starved for memory, and probably beats the hard drive to (near-)death
using the swap file (aka virtual memory). You probably have a pair of
256MB sticks of memory, so get yourself a pair of 1GB DDR2 DIMMs,
install them, sit back, relax and notice the difference. The added
memory will get you through the next six months, at least, and maybe
even a year, which is more likely when Windows 7 (aka Vista Service Pack
2 :) ships... Ben Myers