My current one is old and has been declared a pile of crap by my two usual computer gurus. I know they're right. When I got it I was going for cheapness and I was still studying (it was the cheapest in PC World 6 years ago - some Packard Bell travesty). I'm now self employed and trying to work from it. The hard drive is far too small, most of the USB ports are bust so my printer and external hard drive are working on a time share basis and I can't access the internet because of some problem with the wireless adapter (I guess the model is too old to have a wireless card built in).
The problem now is that my two usual computer gurus have recently converted to Mac and are simply telling me that all my problems would be solved if I did the same. So I was thinking of going down that route until today when I discovered that a crucial specialist piece of software that I need to run on it is not designed for Macs and therefore the support agreement I have with the software company would not be valid.
So this time I'm prepared to splash out a little (maybe up to £800, or £1k if really convinced). I *think* my main needs are lots of memory (hard disk and RAM) and good wireless network capability. For my work, I'm permanently online, sending, receiving and storing files which are often very large and sometimes running a ridiculously complicated (to me) piece of software (Trados, for anyone familiar with it). It also gets a lot of home use, particularly for music downloading.
Any PC-faithfuls fancy recommending what to buy? All I'm hearing at the moment is "get a mac", but it looks like I can't.
