My New Dell arrived and it’s smoking hot!

New post 1/2/2010 Dell XPS 8000 Discontinued? What The Hell Dell? [VIDEO]

This shiny new desktop arrived Tuesday just after I was getting over not feeling so well. When the Fedex guy showed up, I felt instantly better! I unboxed it on Wednesday night over at AskAdria.com.

Specs

• Quad Core Intel i7-860 2.80GHZ
• 8GB DDR3 Memory
• 1.5 TB 7,200 Seagate Sata hard drive (I selected a 1TB)
• nVidia GeForce GTS 240 1024MB GDDR3
• Two 16X CD/DVDRW-+ drives (I only ordered one)
• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Dell 6-button Laser mouse
• Dell keyboard

First, let me say this monster is FAST!  I had plans to install Windows XP, the 64-bit version but found out it has been discontinued for service pack maintenance.  I successfully avoided running Vista on any computers I’ve owned.  I’m not too happy about Windows 7 but hear from reputable tech folks on Twitter it’s a great operating system so…I’ll give it a try.

When I ordered, I thought it would just take a few days to get the system built.  I wanted to order before the holidays so I wouldn’t be waiting weeks.  Well, I was wrong!  It took nearly 2 weeks to ship and Dell overestimate the build time so that once I placed my order, it had an arrival date of December 2nd!  Now, I was initially ticked off at this but since I’ve ordered a lot of systems for my clients, I figured Dell was just covering their backend.

Now I was surprised to find that they had upgraded my hard drive capacity by 500GB and thrown in an extra CD/DVDRW for free!

It’s been a long time since I had a new computer.  My current system is a 2.6GHZ single processor, small form factor (SFF) Shuttle XPC with 2GB of Ram and 2 Sata drives.  Nothing fancy.  I pretty much did remote connections to my client’s systems, work in a text editor and made Skype calls.  It wasn’t until I got the webcam and started doing AskAdria that my technology needs increased.

I stubbornly put off upgrading because I didn’t want to believe I needed some crazy, overpowered system.  Plus, I was getting the itch for a Mac.  As fate would have it, this would be the year that I went to 6 blogging conferences so I had to prioritize attending and put off a new system.

Let me take a moment to thank my conference sponsors for Blogworld; Zendesk and Logmein!

Now how the HECK did I determine I needed such a monsterous computer system?  I mean, 8GB (upgradable to 16GB) is just insane sounding.  Or is it?

Turns out that other people who do web based shows have similar “rigs”.  Two folks I consulted on this decision were OhDoctah of IQMZ and Nic of Filmsnobbery.  They both put out videos on a regular basis.

I came across OhDoctah (Owen JJ Stone aka OhDoctah) last year when Googling for who knows what.  I found his site, AskOhDoctah and was amazed with the honesty and emotions he shared in his videos.  OhDoctah is doing a lot of interviews this year so he needs to process his videos once he returns home.  He calls his computer, “The Beast”.

Nic is a film critic and a darn funny one!  He not only reviews movies but also offers advice to up and coming directors, producers and actors.  He puts out a weekly show and takes time to plan his show with a script and then does quite a bit of post production to insert segways and sponsor call outs.

They both assured me I would need a quad core.  Seemed a bit silly at first but after reading on the i7′s hyperthreading ability which would allow my computer to processes multiple tasks at the same time, I agreed.  I selected a higher grade video card that has a whole 1GB of memory on it.  I’m stoked to see how well my weekly technology show, AskAdria looks as well as my Skype video calls.  In addition to better output, I expect that I will be able to render video faster so tutorials that I put together in Camtasia studio will zip along.  I’m also expecting that multimedia that I view will no longer freeze, skip or refuse to play.

I’d like to thank both of these guys for taking the time to help me spec out my new system and understand this new fangled video stuff!

This Thanksgiving weekend, I’m installing apps and moving over my data.  I can’t believe how much memory this thing has!  We’ll see how well it performs once I have my applications I use to run my business installed including:

• Adobe Flash Media Encoder
• Audacity
• Firefox
• Snagit
• Camtasia Studio
• Picasa
• Keepass
• Yahoo Widgets
• Flickr uploader
• PDFCreator
• Affixa
• Cepstral
• DiskAid
• Evernote
• Google Desktop
• GoToMeeting
• Logmein
• PUTTY
• Quickbooks (Sorry Freshbooks)
• RocketDock
• Skype
• Speedfan
• StreamRipper32
• Teracopy
• TortiseSVN
• VirtualCloneDrive
• VMWare
• Webex
• WinDirStat
• Winmerge
• WinSCP
• Avira
• Spybot Search and Destroy
• Logitech 9000 Pro webcam
• Canon MP780 Printer
• All my website development tools including EditPad Pro, XAMPP, Filezilla, Acetext and more.

Now you may be saying, “Adria, you’ve got Windows 7 Home Premium?”.  Why didn’t you get Windows 7 Ultimate?  Because, good things come to those who wait a bit.  *smile*

I ended up talking with the Microsoft guy at Wordcamp NYC (argued really about open source vs talking) and he had a bunch of Windows 7 Ultimate licences with him.  Too bad they were 32-bit and this monster computer is 64-bit…but he said to email him and he would do his best to get me a 64-bit version before year’s end!  Whee!  That saves me $150 that I could of paid to Dell.

I did get a 2 year warranty with this system and may extend that to 3 years because I truly believe that hardware warranties pay for themselves with piece of mine.

Are there any apps I’m missing that I need?