New Computer
 

my old machine died on me and I'm thinking of getting a Dell. I saw a refurbished dell Optiplex 520GX with 750g on its HD and 4g of Ram for a killer price. I would like some advice and possible warnings so I can make an informed decision.

Be ready to have your eardrums blown out by the jet engine cooling. :D

will you run it on win xp or vista? if on win xp no need 4gb of ram...

also, if it is vista (99% sure it is) be careful if you are going to upgrading to xp because sometimes it forfeits the warranty/guarantee or whatever you call it

Definitely. DEFINITELY.

Dell is worse than crappy, sorry but Dell is charging 50% of the value for it's 5 year warranty. I'd rather ask a friend to build a PC from components if you know somebody nerdy enough.

No need of a nerdy it is very easy to build it and all the information with screenshots and all is posted on the internet.

What's actually died on your PC?

As Juanca said it's not that difficult to build a PC and if your on a tight budget you might be able to keep the cost down by using some parts from your old PC even if it's only the case, CD/DVD drive and maybe power supply unit, I couldn't recommend the Dell as they are usually over priced for what you get and if you buy the components they should all come with at least a 12 month warranty which costs nothing.

An easy option is to buy a motherboard bundle that many companies put together, that's the motherboard, the CPU and often the RAM as well, that way you can be sure the components work together and if you have any problems you only have one company to deal with.
If you think you would like to build your own PC I would definitely say "Try it" you will learn a lot and you will save yourself money by being able to fix, build and upgrade your PC's in the future.

I throw my vote in for building a PC too. It can feel overwhelming, but it's not that hard. You just have to research to pick the right parts, but it's worth it because your computer will probably run better than anything you could buy pre-built for twice as much. It's like putting together legos and the instructions that come with the parts is all you'll need. The part that usually scares me is attaching the heatsink. The AMD heatsinks I had to attach always felt like the latch was going to snap, and the Intel heatsink I attached for my new computer felt like it was going to snap the motherboard, but it all worked out. The worst thing that can happen is you'll end up with a faulty component, and if you're new to building, that can be scary and frustrating.

Well, I'm too much a dumbbass to build my own so I went for what I thought was a good deal. Its a dell GX 520 with a Intel Pentium 4 processor 3.0 ghz with 4G of DDR2 RAM with a HD of 1 terabyte. it also has a Wifi card. I also upgraded the video card to a Nvidea GeForce 6200. and it was all for $485 and its free shipping. Please don't crucify me too bad.