I ordered a new computer about 2 weeks ago. It’s a Dell Hybrid Studio. I got it this last week and i’ve been playing with it over the weekend. As a whole it’s a very nice machine out of the box. The cheapest stock machine wasn’t really anything great, but it would still make a decent media machine for most people, or something to browse the internet and check email, but nothing more than that. While i was ordering i did some upgrading. I went ahead and had the original processor replaced with the 2.0Ghz Intel Duo, i had more RAM added (to a whopping 2GB :P) and as a nice touch, i opted for the BlueRay player (which was a bulk of the cost, 250 dollars just for that). It comes stock with Vista on it, which i’m still trying to figure out if i really like it or not, but it does seem to run pretty nice. It does what i want it to do very well, which is sit next to my TV, stay hooked up to the network, and provide me with entertainment from the interwebs. My television is a 32″ Sanyo HD TV, so it does give a pretty nice picture. On a side not though, if you’re going to do this at home, and you don’t have an HDTV yet, get something nicer, like an Olivia or something. For video and watching TV mine is great, but for displaying a desktop it’s rather lacking.
So. Last tuesday i got the new computer in the mail. I immediately took it out of the box and started playing with it.
It’s about a foot long and about 3 inches wide. Everything is built in pretty well. And it’s all glowy 🙂 It has DVI as well as HDMI output ports on the back which is nice when hooking it up to a HDTV. All in all i really don’t have anything bad to say about this comptuer at all. It’s stable, responsive, and even though my media is elsewhere on the network it does very well with it’s integrated Gigabit Ethernet. When dealing with third party applications though there are some drawbacks. iTunes for instance has a really hard time dealing with all my music on my server, whereas my XP machine has no problems with iTunes. That might just be Vista though, which does seem to be a resource hog. Hardware wise though i’d say this is a very sleek, stylish, and unobstrusive piece to add to any media center, or even just to use as a desktop. Unless of course you want to play games. Then, well, suffice it to say, this machine blows. The integrated Intel Chipset just doesn’t cut it. I can’t even play Eve-Online with the premium graphics pack, and compared to other games out there, Eve is very light-weight.
Over all though, I like it – a lot. I would recommend it to any of my friends.