Wot has she bought? ('puters again)

[Daddles]

Long story - there is a 'help' in there though

I arrived at my gf's place on thursday, to discover that she'd bought her son a computer that day. Now, she'd been talking about this for awhile and we'd discussed slipping off to the local computer shop without the lad for a chat with someone who know what they were talking about without the distraction of the lad.

Now, neither my gf nor the lad know ANYTHING about computers - really, it's scary. The lad is also one of these 'must have the latest and greatest' types, and he's rather ... umm ... indulged.

Anyway, he had a day off school on thursday and they were in town shopping (let's ignore the topic that scenario opens ... please). They dropped into David Jones, my gf's favourite shop. And came home with a computer ... at $2,200 for just a computer, no printer or any of the other stuff that often comes with packages these days - not even cordless keyboard or mouse, but it does have a nice big lcd screen (I am jealous of that bit).

When I upgraded my son's computer recently, I spent a lot of time talking with the local computer boffin about what is needed to play the modern games (about all that matters to kids at this age). He wound up building me a system for $1,000 that he claims will play 95% of the games out there on the current market. So far it plays all the games my son wants to with ease, but not a couple that my gf's son wants to own.

So thursday night, we rock up at my gf's place to find this shiny new computer buzzing and beeping as they do. The boys then loaded their favourite game, which my son's puter plays with ease (Jedi Academy) ... and it wouldn't play smoothly. In fact, after checking to make sure everything was working as it should, we had to go into the game options and drop the quality of the detail and other graphics effects (from the default settings).

Thinking about it and remembering what the local boffin had talked about, I'm suspecting the graphics card isn't up to scratch. The computer is an HP (I didn't get the model number). It's running a Pentium 4 at 3.06 Gig, has 512 Meg of RAM, so it's no slug (but has a tiny hardrive by today's standards).

The graphics card is a 'GeForce 6200SE TurboCache' - sadly that means nothing to me and I was wondering if someone could shed some light on its abilities.

So far, my gf and her son think their new toy is wonderful. They're convinced that they've bought a great machine and did an absolutely wonderful job buying it. My gf is really proud of herself for managing what to her was going to be a very scary exercise. I'm looking at an expensive beast with a big processer that can't play the same game to the same standard as my son's box with a humble celeron (but carefully chosen video card) at half the price.

Apart from some feedback on the card mentioned above, some thoughts on what I do now would be appreciated. So far, I've kept my trap shut but if the computer has struggled with one game (a two year old game - Jedi Academy), I can see it struggling again, especially as the kid is determined to have the latest Need For Speed (apparently a top end game) - and guess who's going to have to 'fix' it. I'm suspecting that a HP isn't going to be cheap to upgrade, and I'm imagining my gf's face as I try to explain that she'll have to spend a few more hundred on top of what she's already paid, not to mention the realisation that she hasn't made such a good buy afterall (this is the bit that hurts me). On the other hand, they've owned the computer for a few days now and I don't know how she'd get on going back to David Jones and telling them she'd like a refund because the computer isn't good enough.

Sadly, telling the spoilt brat to pull his head in because his dodgy computer is the result of him nagging his mother into an impulse buy isn't going to work either, nor be understood, though it is what happened

Help? This is one of those cases where I'm damned whatever I do.

Richard

[Sir Stinkalot]

If it is the same game that I am thinking of (Starwars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy) I can run it on a P3 866 with 64mb Video card and 512mb sd ram.

If your GF just spent $2200 on a desktop machine it should be the ants pants ..... if you are not happy with it take the box back and ask them to look at it at DJ's. Stores are too happy to flog off any machine to anybody, particularly old stock if the customer doesn't know what they are talking about. Old stock is generally more expensive and slower than the new stock and they have to find a bunny to sell it off to ..... I hope this didn't happen in your case.

If in doubt take it back ...... its all well and good them selling it to you but they should also look after you after the sale if you are having problems.

[woodbe]

I agree with SS, but that may cause problems with gf and kid.

Sounds like the graphics card is crippled. Does it have the latest Nvidia drivers installed? (It probably wouldn't out of the box from DJ's) You can get them here:

http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

Here's a link to a comparison of graphics cards, looks like the machine is PCI-Express, which is something (relatively current)

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/05/24/vga_charts_vi/

Good luck,

woodbe

[woodbe]

Nvidia drivers are 20mb download, latest version is Version: 81.98
Release Date: February 7, 2006

[Daddles]

Thanks boys, downloading the drivers now. Hope they help and it won't be hard to pass this off as 'just a refinement'.

You're right about the game SS - which is why I was a tad surprised when it didn't want to work properly in this new box.

Richard

[Ianab]

If it's got a really nice big LCD display (which is probably where all the $$ went) then it's default mode may be pretty high res. 1600 x 1200 maybe?
Thats pretty high res for gaming and will bog down a middle of the road video card. If dropping the res back to sensible settings fixes the problem then thats good.
A 128mb 6200 VGA card is still a current model, but it's at the lower end of games cards ~$100. But you can go out and spend an extra $1000 and make that $2000 PC into a $3000 one that will play most any game in super Hi-res
That PC should go OK, hopefully the new drivers give it a bit more Vroom

Cheers

Ian

[Termite]

Richard, would seriousy consider another 512Mb of RAM, the bloke next door just bought one of those HP's (wouldn't listen:mad: ) and that was the first thing I had him do, massive improvement. With the things HP load onto the hard drive (60% of which is unneccesary junk :mad: ) it eats up about half the RAM just at idle.

[Daddles]

Thanks for the thoughts Ian - I suspected something of the sort as far as the card goes. The game defaults to 800x600 but I'll look at that.

I wondered about that Termite. It's bloody frightening in there. Did it take standard RAM?

I ask this, because I asked about adding RAM to my Dell and was told it needs to be custom made :eek: Sure, the extra cost is only $30 but sheesh. Good thing I don't really need it, just felt like giving the old girl a present - I settled for wiping the dust off the screen instead - made a big difference

Flamin' games. :mad:

Richard

[Termite]

Did it take standard RAM?

I ask this, because I asked about adding RAM to my Dell and was told it needs to be custom made :eek: Sure, the extra cost is only $30 but sheesh. Good thing I don't really need it, just felt like giving the old girl a present - I settled for wiping the dust off the screen instead - made a big difference

Flamin' games. :mad:

Richard

It's still under warranty so I wouldn't delve into the innards, got him to take it back to Hardley Normals and have them do it.

[Termite]

Richard, there's a lot not to like about HP machines, the main one is the fact that they do not give you a Windows disc even though you have paid for the program. Getting a disc from them is mission impossible, many have tried.

If you need to do a format of your hard drive all your installation files are in a partition on your hard drive. This means that if you take the time to delete the previously mentioned crap (about an hours work) when you restore your operating system from the disc partition all the crap goes back on too.

[Harry72]

Yup gotta be carefull of them big shops like DJ's buying a PC from them is like buying crapiarta from bunnies...
Just to give you an idea of current prices, I just upgraded my PC cost just over $3k from Dell(5150), specs= P4 3.4g/1024mb ram/ATI 256mb DDR2 graphics/160Gb HD/dual layer DVD burner and separate DVD drive/latest Soundblaster card/my fav bit 24"wide screen!/cordless KB&mouse/ all in one printer/scanner(upgraded model)

Old one was a custom job(built in 2000) PIII600/384mb ram/32mb geforceDDR(1st gen)/16Gb HD/19" CRT/sblive/jaton dvd decoder/ printer and scanner=$4600! But cant complian got 6yrs reliability from it.

[Harry72]

The ram for a Dell is to with the m/boards they use, the ram needs to be set to run in a certan mode or some thing?

[woodbe]

Daddles, what video card did your son land up with?

I suspect that short of sending the whole thing back, the best fix for the HP will be a video card upgrade. You also can't have too much ram so that might be money well spent, but you can probably drive a truck through the HP stuff's memory use by turning it all off. Doesn't matter if it stays on the HD.

If you look at the link to tom's hardware I posted, those 6200 cards are down the bottom of the pile in all the tests. We have one gamer in the family, and he gets 'video card itch' every 1-2 years. He usually lands up spending about $7-800 and flogging the old one on ebay for maybe $300. You could search ebay to see what the 6200 is worth, but I suspect 'not a lot'... Reasonably recent midrange cards should be around $3-500, just depends how much better you want to go, which is why I asked what card is in your son's system.

woodbe

[craigb]

DJ's are pretty good with returns. If it's possible to convince your gf that the best course of acion is to take it back and get a refund, that'd be the best I reckon.

[Termite]

DJ's are pretty good with returns. If it's possible to convince your gf that the best course of acion is to take it back and get a refund, that'd be the best I reckon.

Definitely the best option. The local 'puter shop will do a better job.