New
#1
Mirrored or double drive--current thinking?
My wife's XP machine is ready for the pasture. The machine has a second drive that we both use for storing redundant Acronis images of her OS and mine with other images stored on the second logical drive of her primary hard drive. The setup has worked fine.
At work she has several PowerSpec computers that arrive with mirrored drives. The computers are reliable and inexpensive. You would have to install a 3rd drive to have the Acronis resting place as with our current setup. I really do not see the value.
So I'm here posing the pre-purchase question, given the preceding, as follows: For a home computer that does a lot of important personal Quicken work for us among other tasks, the basics would be: Windows 7 with a Win8 upgrade disk, 4-8 GB memory, Intel instead of AMD average speed mulitcore processors with graphics on the processor (we do not do games nor imaging other than looking at stills)
With the questionable aspects being:
1. Machine pre-configured with the OS and whatever belongs on a boot SSD drive vs. standard drive?
2. The second drive being larger than her current second drive since the first SSD drive would be smaller due to cost?
3. Assuming I could configure at will with PowerSpec (which I do not know, particularly with the SSD component) are there other boxes that don't advertise and keep the cost down yet folks here have found to be reliable and have decent repair--service options?
4. ANY suggestions along these obvious lines are surely welcome!
Mark