Help me, help a church

Modred189

Can't Read the OP
Joined
May 24, 2006
Messages
16,308
I am part of a committee at my church whose job it is to upgrade and re-do our church's website. Right now, it's abysmal, ugly, hideous etc: http://stpaulsrochester.org/

Go ahead and vomit.

Ok, now that THAT is done, I have been put in charge of looking into piecing together (building) or buying (from an OEM) a computer for them to use for:
-Web development (dreamweaver)
-photo editing (photoshop elements)
-possible, limited, video editing (premier elements)

as well as other tasks involved with the creation and maintenance of a basic website, including some database work. It will NOT be located on this system, this will simply be the access machine for our part time webmaster. I am in no way big on web development, but I know my hardware, well Intel hardware...

Key aspects need to include:
-CHEAP but effective
-reliable parts

So far I threw together two builds around the 500$ target price:
PDC 2180, 4gb ram, 500gb hd, Asus P5B-VM, Antec NSK 4480 w/ 380w psu, Vista HomePremium 64bit and an optical drive for 513$

The second is an amd based system,
Phenom 8450 3xcore, 4gb ram, 500gb hd, vista hp 64, same case and psu, with an Asus M3n78 mobo.

Now I don't know AMD much, but I know that extra core will help in video editing...

Any ideas?
 
For budget builds, you really can't beat the prices of the manufacturers like Dell. Plus you get their free support if the tech guy isnt around.
 
For budget builds, you really can't beat the prices of the manufacturers like Dell. Plus you get their free support if the tech guy isnt around.
Yea, that's the thing I was also considering. The problem is, no one at the church is going to want to deal with phone tech support.
However, conflicts of interests start to get involved since I work at bestBuy part time (the only close big box), and it might look rather shady.... but it's a consideration ...
 
Doesn't Best Buy have something from HP that would be comparable to a similar Dell product? The point is valid, though - a complete system with some kind of warranty and service provision will beat any home-built unless you're building a high-end computer.

As far as super-powerful computers - you don't really need much for what you're proposing. Photoshop Elements doesn't use a lot of resources for most basic photo editing tasks and web-page fiddly bits (buttons etc). As long as they don't try patching multiple 16MB pro camera images into a panorama etc, they should be fine.

If software costs are a consideration - GIMP instead of Photoshop Elements. There are open-source video editing packages too, but I don't know them. Nor can I comment on Dreamweaver-like packages; I still code HTML etc by hand with a simple editor.
 
For those that need/want a WYSIWYG, you can use NVU as a opensource replacement for Dreamweaver. It's easy to use and should cover your needs.

http://www.nvudev.com/index.php

"Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML."
 
Back
Top