We've had our office network in place and everything is running the same Windows XP setup and is working very well. However I know that sooner or later we've got to be prepared for Windows 7.
Over the weekend I saw in the Walmart sales circulaer that they had an Acer 15.6" laptop for $298. 2 gig ram, 250 gig hard drive, decent AMD chip, etc. The price was too good to turn down for a computer that will serve as a backup and as a trial platform to see what will and what won't work on Win7.
So I picked one up, brought it back to the office, did a little configuration, and bye gosh it found almost everything on the network by itself, is functioning well, etc.
So if you need a new computer or just want to break in to Win 7, this may be something you want to look at. Lots of value for under $300.
Funny you should mention that. Sounds like they are getting cheaper. I bought a Acer Aspire 5517 3 mos. ago at Fry's for $350. It has a 15.6" screen, AMD Athlon Dual Core processor, 3 GB ram, 250 GB HD, Dual Layer DVD burner, Win 7 Premium, and a card reader. Works great for when I'm on the road and it seems to be plenty fast enough.
I'm posting on a 600 dollar Aspire with Intel 2.0 ghz. duo core processor, 4 gig RAM, 17" screen with number pad running Vista, has been a great machine for the past 8 months or so.
I made a massive step backward, and bought two Dell XP machines that I do all my survey work with so the older collectors will work.
Remember, "you get what you pay for"....
Graphics
My frustration with my current mini-tower is that it does not have a powerful enough graphics "adapter" (actually integrated in the motherboard) to do some of the things I want, such as use the ESRI viewer. I would think surveyors would be much more interested in graphics than I am. The laptops with 1 GB of video RAM are over $1000 when you add in the extras that many people would want (Microsoft Office, the professional version of Windows 7, etc.)
Graphics
The problem we have at work is the software updates outstrip the dated hardware we have. It takes a loooooooooooooooooong time to get a new computer although we've heard rumors that we are in line to get 64bit machines with massively huge ram and HDs.
How did you get it to transfer files from a Windows XP machine to a Windows 7 machine?
I could hook my moms up to the network and it could print, but couldn't get it to find any machines, much less share anything they had.
I just turned it on and it found every shared folder on every machine in the office. Sometimes things work like they should - sometimes not.
