turbonium959

Hey, I am only meant to help! I must have misread about the Norton, it was a big post you know. But I totally understand your situation. I am in college too, and it is NOT cheap. About now it is still just a little bit cheaper to build a very nice systems yourself, but if you don't have the funding, then getting it through financing is the way to go.

BTW, how did it work out with your oil filter situation? Peace

THEGOLDPRO

hey i have a sony vaio. lol but yeah it does suck. j/k its a decient computer, for what i use it for.

zchild92

LOL You should have washed your car Goldie!

Turbonium: I purchased the A/C delco which was the bigger filter. I did take your advise and checked the filters for the older 323's, you were right. The Fram filters for the old 323's is the same size as the A/C delco I'm currently using. Hopefully after swinging by BB tonight to vent some more I can swing by the parts store for some pics

UCSBgeek

CompUSA does though, and sometimes they have models exclusive to their stores. My mom & brother have a Toshiba laptop. Nice I have a Dell system and it's great. My advice for people who don't know too much about computers is to try and find a friend who's good at that stuff to help out, and look at sites like dell.com, alienware.com and see how they compare to the stores. Good luck zchild

kc5zom

Screw Dell. Frickin proprietary pieces of crap. Cost a mint to repair once the warranty is up. Lots of parts you have to purchase from Dell or do without, especially power supplies which are one of the more unreliable components in a PC (although I have never had one go bad on me, just fixed other peoples).

UCSBgeek

Yeah I've helped people with broken power supplies on their dell's... but during warranty so it was fixed quick. My 3-year warranty (which they don't provide standard anymore, I think), just expired in September, still no problems here....

and I don't have any proprietary parts on my machine....Diamond video card (well they used to be big), Sound Blaster, 3com network card, Intel mobo, toshiba DVD.... though I don't know their current systems that well...

Jurrell

zchild92

Update:

Spent around 3 more hours in Best Buy today, we returned the Sony pos and bought an HP Multimedia station for a few hundred dollars more than the Sony. The original price of the HP was in the upper $2g's and we got it for $1500 flat. We got him to throw in a 17" flat panel and an HP all-in-one printer, copier, scanner. We got everything at Best Buys cost, some things a bit under cost. Luckily for me my girlfriend was there doing her usual haggel bit, she saved me hundreds today. I just told her what I wanted and she knocked the price down till she was happy.

This thing also has Tivo built into it, so I can record tv shows to the hard drive. I like extra features that are useless.

Anywayz here's the specs:
Processor Brand
Intel® Pentium® 4 processor

Processor Speed
2.53A GHz

System Bus
533MHz

Cache Memory
8KB L1 cache + 512KB L2 cache

System Memory (RAM)
512MB

System Memory (RAM) Expandable To
1.0GB

Type of Memory (RAM)
DDR SDRAM

Hard Drive Type
Ultra DMA

Hard Drive Size
120.0GB

Video Memory
64MB DDR SDRAM

Graphics
nVidia GeForce4 MX 420 graphics card

MPEG
Yes

Audio
Sound Blaster Audigy 5.1

Speakers
Yes

Modem
56 Kbps* ITU V.90 *Capable of receiving 56 Kbps downloads. However, current regulations limit download speed to 53 Kbps.

Network Card
Integrated 10/100Base-T networking interface

CD-ROM Drive
Yes

Maximum CD-ROM Drive Speed
48x

CD-RW Drive
Shared

CD-RW Drive Speeds
12x10x32

DVD-ROM Drive
Shared

Maximum DVD-ROM Drive Speed
8x

DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo Drive
No

DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo Drive Speeds
No DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive

DVD-RW Drive
Yes, DVD+RW

DVD-RW Drive Speeds
2.4 x 2.4 x 8 DVD+RW (combo drive with CD-RW drive)

Removable Storage
None

Diskette Drive
Yes

Diskette Drive Type
3.5" 1.44MB

Total Expansion Bays
External: 1 (3.5"), 2 (5.25"); Internal: 2 (3.5")

Available Expansion Bays
No available expansion bays

Total Expansion Slots
3 PCI, 1 AGP

Available Expansion Slots
No available expansion slots

USB Ports
5 USB 2.0 (1 front, 4 back)

Parallel Ports
1

IEEE 1394 Ports
2

Serial Ports
1

Game Ports
0

Keyboard Description
HP media center PC keyboard with full multimedia control

Other Control Devices (mouse, etc.)
PS/2 optical scrolling mouse and remote control; S-video and composite video TV-out

Operating System
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition, a superset of Windows XP Professional

Software Included
WordPerfect Productivity Pack, including WordPerfect 10 and Quattro Pro 10; Intuit Quicken Financial Center/New User's Edition 2002; HP Picture and Video Toolkit, RecordNow, Memories Disc Creator; Adobe Acrobat Reader; InterVideo WinDVD SE; MyDVD and more

Product Height
15.75"

Product Width
8.3"

Product Depth
15.75"

Product Weight
35 lbs.

Manuals Included
User's guide, Microsoft Windows XP manual

Warranty Term — Parts
1-year limited

Warranty Term — Labor
1-year limited

UCSBgeek

**Jealousy!!**

zchild92

There, there Chasten. Go have a it'll make you feel better.

Jurrell

how can you bargan the price down at a department store?!

zchild92

Take my girlfriend shopping with you next time and you'll see.

I'll scan the invoice once I get the new PC on Tuesday.

kc5zom

You just have to ask. We bought a forty dollar cordless phone last week and got them to throw in a $20 headset for free. Nobody else was even running a free headset special that week, but Best Buy was running one the week before for a 10-15 dollar headset.

pollax

I checked the specs and the Sony RX-830 has a 2.0GHz processor and the Sony RX-860 has a 2.4GHz processor. Not like it makes a difference now since you returned it.

zchild92

The RX-830 provided over the holiday shopping season (Thanksgiving) was a special PC from Sony specifically for that day. The RX-830 was a 2.66, I think Sony probably just used the 830 platform and put in the 2.66 processor.