Help me configure my new Dell computer. Thanks in advance.

[gary11364]

I will be using the computer for burning backups, encoding, downloading torrents and surfing the internet. No gaming. My budget is around $1,000. I have an external hard drive. I will not be purchasing a monitor, speakers or keyboard. I am planning on 2GB Ram, 250GB Hard Drive, Dual Drive DVD Reader + DVD Burner, 256MB Video Card.
1- Should I use an AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual core 4000 or an Intel Core 2 Duo E 4300(1.8GHZ, 800 FSB) processor, The Intel is an extra $100. I am interested in longevity and would pay extra for this.
2- Should I use an XP Pro or Vista Premium OS?
3- Would I be able to Burn, Download torrents and Surf the internet at the same time?
Thanks in advance!

[redwudz]

1. I favor the AMD AM2 X2 CPUs, but either will work fine.

2. I would set it up with XP or XP Pro. Vista still needs a bit more time to develop.

3. With a dual core, you should be able to do that with no real problems. Encoding will be slower if you multitask.

I would also use two internal hard drives. Use a smaller one for your boot drive and programs and a larger one for video. External drives usually don't perform as well as internal drives, except for SCSI or SATA externals. USB and FireWire externals are OK for storage, but they are much slower than any internal drive.

And your posts would get a better reception if you just use the default settings, not bold typeface.

[budz]

I will be using the computer for burning backups, encoding, downloading torrents and surfing the internet. No gaming. My budget is around $1,000. I have an external hard drive. I will not be purchasing a monitor, speakers or keyboard. I am planning on 2GB Ram, 250GB Hard Drive, Dual Drive DVD Reader + DVD Burner, 256MB Video Card.
1- Should I use an AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual core 4000 or an Intel Core 2 Duo E 4300(1.8GHZ, 800 FSB) processor, The Intel is an extra $100. I am interested in longevity and would pay extra for this.
2- Should I use an XP Pro or Vista Premium OS?
3- Would I be able to Burn, Download torrents and Surf the internet at the same time?
Thanks in advance!

First of all it's not a good idea to be burning dvds while downloading and surfing the internet all at the same time. If you don't do any gaming then buy a INTEL CORE2DUO processor. I'd suggest getting the new CONROE processor 1.86ghz with 4M shared L2 cache. Video encoding is much faster than a AMD AM2 DUAL CORE processor. I'd also suggest building your own computer if you are able to. I'd suggest sticking with XP PRO for now and you don't need 256mb of video for video encoding, 128mb is enough as you said you won't be doing gaming. Because video encoding is not affected by how big the mbs on a video card is, it's dependant on how fast your processor is. It's cpu intensive so the faster the processor the quicker the video encoding will be. That's just my 2 cents!

[Webster]

I will be using the computer for burning backups, encoding, downloading torrents and surfing the internet. No gaming. My budget is around $1,000. I have an external hard drive. I will not be purchasing a monitor, speakers or keyboard. I am planning on 2GB Ram, 250GB Hard Drive, Dual Drive DVD Reader + DVD Burner, 256MB Video Card.
1- Should I use an AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual core 4000 or an Intel Core 2 Duo E 4300(1.8GHZ, 800 FSB) processor, The Intel is an extra $100. I am interested in longevity and would pay extra for this.
2- Should I use an XP Pro or Vista Premium OS?
3- Would I be able to Burn, Download torrents and Surf the internet at the same time?
Thanks in advance!

If you really want a Dell, try to get an optiplex 745 dual cores refurbished from their outlet site. You'll still get the 3 years inhome warranty and save some cash in the process.
http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/topics/global.aspx/arb/online/en/InventorySea...=22&l=en&s=dfh

[bmo]

I will be using the computer for burning backups, encoding, downloading torrents and surfing the internet. No gaming. My budget is around $1,000. I have an external hard drive. I will not be purchasing a monitor, speakers or keyboard. I am planning on 2GB Ram, 250GB Hard Drive, Dual Drive DVD Reader + DVD Burner, 256MB Video Card.
1- Should I use an AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual core 4000 or an Intel Core 2 Duo E 4300(1.8GHZ, 800 FSB) processor, The Intel is an extra $100. I am interested in longevity and would pay extra for this.
2- Should I use an XP Pro or Vista Premium OS?
3- Would I be able to Burn, Download torrents and Surf the internet at the same time?
Thanks in advance!

I'd look into building one on your own. It's a great experience and you learn a lot but I suppose the only problem is the issue of no warranty. However, if something goes wrong then that's what forums like this are for right? As for the processor, the Intel Core2 E4300 is only like $14 dollars more than the Athlon X2 4000 on Newegg.com (great site by the way if you are going to build your computer). However, I'd look into getting the Intel Core 2 E6320. It's a little more expensive, however it has the 4mb of L2 cache which would be good for encoding, and if you know how to overclock (or have a friend who knows), you could easily reach 3.0ghz with this processor (only with proper cooling). An Intel Core 2 at 3.0ghz would easily beat almost any AMD processor out there right now. Check out this link for performance comparisons on both the E6320 and the X2 4000+ http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2duo-e6420_6.html. As for operating systems XP Pro is the best choice for now as the others posters have mentioned. Yes you'd be able to burn and surf the internet at the same time. Just make sure that whatever you're burning is on a different hard drive than where your internet browser is installed. One more thing, since you're not going to be gaming I'd suggest looking for a motherboard with integrated graphics since it would be cheaper overall, unless you're going to use the computer as a media center or something then I'd go with a dedicated gfx card.

[gary11364]

Is a second internal hard drive really needed if I can Rip and Burn off of my external hard drive that I have now? Plus external hard drives have obvious advantages of privacy, security and unlimited storage. I want to stay away from Vista because of DRM, bugs and I do not need multimedia.

[SingSing]

Yes, you want two hard drives.

1. It is much faster to encode and transcode with source and destiny at different hard drives.

2. You can have two different OS/setup on different drive, and just change the boot order to select.