After a brief foray into the Apple world, I think I can safely say that I want to be back with PCs. So, I'm probably selling my unibody Macbook Pro and buying a PC + iPhone (for basic mobile computing).

My limit for the PC was 1 grand with monitor, and I'm happy to say it came in much less than that. Here it is: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=13648468

That, plus an iPhone on a family plan, comes out to roughly 1 grand. I was thinking of possibly getting a Blackberry, as long as I can check my email, some basic websites and IM people (AIM, MSN, etc).

Comments, suggestions?

Avoid the Blackberry, and wait for iPhone 2.

iPhone 3?

And if you already have the iPhone, why would you need the Blackberry? Blackberry may be better at the "office" tasks, but not better enough that you should need two devices.

I don't already have the iPhone.

I have a Macbook Pro and a cruddy free phone with TMobile.

I want to sell the Macbook Pro.

And I want to buy a PC for gaming and an iPhone (or possibly Blackberry) for mobile stuff (as well as phone obviously).

And thanks for the heads up yoda! My contract expires in August anyway, so I can wait on the phone replacement!

oh. well in that case, my understanding (having owned an iPhone and talking to many people about it, including a friend who tried running a company full of iPhones instead of blackberrys) is:

Unless you NEED to conduct a lot of business on your phone, iPhone is the way to go. It's way cooler and more fun, it's just not as great for lots of emailing

I'd spend the extra $45 to turn that Core 2 Duo into a Core 2 Quad Q8200. Of course, I do a lot of highly-parallelizable work, so the extra 2 cores and extra cache is worth much more to me than the extra .4GHz.

Also, eww G.Skill RAM. It's all about the Corsair, man.

I'm curious why you're getting one nice WD hard drive and one tiny under-cached Seagate. Why not get two WDs?

For comparison, here's the rather more expensive (and sans-GPU and monitor) system that I've got in my rolling window of computers to build: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=5735786

how much would you be selling your MBP for?

Around $1500. I could spend all that on the new PC, but I need to shove some into savings, and I don't game THAT heavily.

Nice knowing you.

PNY optima RAM is nice also.

anda 512mb vid card might work for you, depends...

Bought! Thanks!

It's probably too late, but if you want a cheaper video card the ATI Radeon 4770 is the best $100 card out there. :P
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2347388,00.asp

Although I would still advise against giving ATI/AMD your video card business...

So what did you end up buying? The exact system you linked us to?

You could have saved a bit more if you went for an AMD cpu/mobo solution, a different monitor and minus the third party fan/cooler. An ATI gpu is optional as their performance can be on par or slightly below a Nvidia gpu, plus if you plan to use Linux on the machine the Nvidia gpu helps.

EDIT: If price/performance was the big thing you were aiming for, you could have done better, imo.

I also noticed there is no disc drive...

Same as is in the list, plus a dvd drive.