Hello Joel,
It sure is good to hear from you and I hope you're
doing well. I do miss the good ole days working with you at Reynolds! How are
Donna and all your family doing? Say hello to all them for me. You can find my
email address at the bottom of this page.
The link you sent me was missing a few characters,
but I think I figured it out. Here is the one I reviewed. The link below should
take you to the one you are interested in buying.
I also found the same computer at Dell.com and it is
the same price so it means that you found a good deal. (Keep in mind that Dell
prices change all the time and may be lower later today.)
$1,099.99
$1,099.99
I do recommend the one you picked, but the choice
between Costco and Dell is yours.
Technological notes:
I
have recently bought 2 identical computers and have set them up using the same
instruction sheet.
For some reason, the first
computer was very responsive, and the second computer was very sluggish and I
could not understand why.
When I looked at the windows
task manager and the networking tab, I noticed that the responsive computer
made better use of the bandwidth, i.e. some mapped network drives on both PCs
responded differently. Accessing those network drives on the responsive PC
showed the graph going up and down a large amount, i.e. up to 25% for very
short periods of times. However, the less responsive PC, when I did the same
test, the graph only went up to 1% and it stayed at 1% for long periods of
times, until the task was complete.
I have looked at the network
settings, and everything seems to match on both PCs, network card, driver
version, settings etc., etc.
In
summary, if the computer you purchase does not perform as well as you need,
consider that Costco has a 90 day return policy whereas Dell only has a 30 day
return policy.
I hope that helps,
Jim
__________________________________________________________________
Jim Carrier, Ph.D.
Professor
Computer Science
Guilford Technical Community College
james.a.carrier@gmail.com