I have two networked systems, 5 years old, Dell Dimension 8200
(Pentium 4) & 2400 (Celeron). Both are still going strong BUT I
anticipate that before too very much longer, something critical will
eventually "give out", and it will be then time to upgrade to new
systems. I have lots of peripherals & special software. What's the
best way to go through such an upgrade. Any & all good advice will be
greatly appreciated & thanks ....
Neither is terribly old, if you clean the dust out
periodically (period depending on environment) and replace
failing fans when needed, either system should run for 10
years or more unless there is a clear fault condition rather
than wearing out.
Nevertheless you wrote about lots of peripherals and special
software as if this is a concern, but without mentioning
these peripherals or software, there's nothing _we_ can
consider about that.
In other words, you have not given any detail we could use
to offer any suggestions beyond buying another brand than
Dell if you have two systems still fairly young in age from
Dell that fail prematurely. I'm not suggesting Dells do
fail prematurely, although on their low and middle grade
systems the rear exhaust fan does tend to get a bit noisey
before it ought to, is not a high enough quality fan for
the dual purpose of chassis and passive CPU cooling in my
opinion. If/when that fan fails it can be replaced with
minimal cost and time spent.
Since Dimensions are fairly typical PC configurations, it
seems likely any similar modern equivalent would be
sufficient, EXCEPT for one important factor in that your
peripherals and software may require (WinXP?) the current
operating system, may not run on Vista. Therefore the only
real advice I can give based on info provided is get another
Dimension (since at the 5 year point they seem to have
served you acceptibly and still work) but with WinXP instead
of Vista. As always, a performance increase is nice, it
should have a Core2Duo or Core Quad processor and at least
1GB memory... though you can often add the memory yourself
instead of it coming with that much and save a buck or two,
though these days memory is so cheap Dell might be putting
1GB even in it's low-end systems, I haven't checked on that
recently.