ADVENT Computers Advent DT1411

My wife was complaining that her Acer computer was slowing down and making weird noises. I investigated and thought that the vents could do with a clean as they seemed somewhat clogged with dust, so I shut down the machine, disconnected everything and with the help of an air-duster (a can the expels air stronger than you can blow) and vacuum cleaner cleaned them all out nicely. The problem was that when I plugged the machine back in, there was a flash and burning smell and… nothing… I took the side of and saw a scorch mark on the mother-board. Time for a new computer, but as my wife wanted one there and then she hot-footed it to PC World. She was determined to get the highest spec that she could as she had used mine that was a custom built to edit videos and had been impressed with its performance. I was otherwise engaged and couldn't go with her.

Phoning me from PC World, she said she was looking at an Advent DT1411 with an i5 - 2320 processor, 8GBs of RAM and a 1.5TB disk that had been reduced by £90. The next lowest spec was the same make, only £10 cheaper.. We both agreed that it would be better to go for the DT1411. The salesman seemed a little confused when she said she just wanted it to do her family history research, sort our her photos and word processing but didn't argue too much. Well, why would he?

When she brought it home, I set it up for her and started feeling somewhat envious.. It was a quad Intel processor and was faster than my quad AMD that runs 2.90GHZ. No, I didn't suggest we swop machines as all my video-editing software was set up, but I was tempted.. But I don't think that she would have taken me up on that offer anyway!

I did however, have the new wireless keyboard as most of the letters on mine are nearly worn off. There was no arm-twisting over that either because she is more than happy with her current keyboard. She didn't need a monitor because she has a perfectly good one from her last computer.

Performance.

The i5 2320 processor coupled with the 8GB of RAM makes his machine very fast, in my opinion. I have always gone for the best I can buy as I do a lot of video editing and processing on my machines. I know that the DT1411 is not supposed to be the fastest of machines, but to me, it is the fastest machine that I have ever worked on, and should my machine go bust any time soon, I've got a good idea of what spec I am going to go for. Word documents and my wife's family history program opens in seconds. And whilst I haven't timed the start-up of this machine, I certainly wouldn't have time to boil a half-full kettle, let alone make a cup of tea as I can with mine. Jealous? Who me?

The machine runs whisper quiet, and to help it along even more, has a dedicated AMD 2GB GDDR3 graphics card. And to make things even better we have recently upgraded our broadband with BT to BT Infinity, so online work is incredible.

The first time start was just plug in and go. I just followed the on-screen instructions and Windows 7, 64 bit loaded up. In my opinion, this is the best yet in the Windows operating systems. We were advised to make some back-up disks, which we did. I had already taken the 250 GB hard drive out of her old computer, and placed it in a drive caddy. I checked it over and reformatted it, and made sure that there were no errors at all on it. I simply then loaded all her programs and backed up a drive image onto the hard drive and she was well backed-up if anything should go wrong.. But all will be OK probably, but it's always best to have a good backup of your system when it is running at its best. Once a week then, we set up auto-backup to the spare drive..

The 1.5 GB drive is more than adequate for my wife's use, but I would imagine that with my video files, I would make a lot of use of it and if we were to hook it up to our TV, as some people do, it would be excellent for downloading films.

The machine isn't much of a looker. Mine has a see-through side and blue lights on the front, but who bothers to look at the tower when working with a quad 3 GHZ Intel processor? It is just a plain black machine with 2 X USB ports to the front and 6 at the back at the back. On the front there are also slots for SD cards and other cards, all situated neatly in compartments behind the fold-down doors on the front.

So all-in-all at a little over £600 (after the £90 price reduction), I feel that we have got a good machine here. I notice that they are selling this model on Ebay from just under £400 at the time of writing, but they are no longer available in PC World. Advent probably already has an upgrade to this machine

The usual software comes built in with this computer and immediately on connecting with the Internet, it updated. Microsoft Office is installed as a 30 day trial, but I uninstalled that as my wife already purchased the software with her last computer. We have our desktops wired into the modem but there is a way to operate this machine wirelessly. I also uninstalled Norton anti-virus software as we use Mcafee for two machines and our laptop that has only just been renewed.

My wife is over the moon with her new computer, and seems to be smiling every time she's been working on it. So if you want a machine that will make you smile at its performance, I would recommend this one..

Thanks for reading.