Bit of advice required before i buy PC

TCannoyed

Seen a PC i would like for £600 inc.

Pentium 4 (3ghz), with Windows Media centre, 1024 mb, 160 gb hard drive, 16 x dvd+/-rw drive, 17" flat monitor, microsoft works, printer, modem, 128mb ATI Radeon X300 SE Hypermemory graphics card.

Does it sound any good?

Whats the graphics card like?

Most importantly is there anything missing?

Xenate

Yeah sounds allright. Just looked at Dell and they do near enough the exact same thing for £600 and they've got offers on at the moment.

brummybloke

what are you going to be using it for?

if it is for the latest games you may want to check the response rate on the monitor and also improve the graphics card as the one that comes with it is , to be blunt..poo for any top rated games like call of duty 2, doom 3.
you also need to check what mother board comes with it, will there be enough pci slots incase you want to put anythig else in your pc?
how many usb ports?
is it a min or midi tower?
does it come with an operating system? ( windows xp?)


the mesh deal posted elsewhere seems reasonable nd is the same sort of price with 19" tft, better processor, better graphics card, keyboard, mouse.

Dude

How long is the warranty and what manufacturer is it?

scorour

Looks OK (would compare with others, if you have not already done so), depends what you are wanting to use it for....I have been using Media Center for a year now and love it....

What are you planning to use this PC for?

Dude

scorour wrote:

I have been using Media Center for a year now and love it....

Excuse my ignorance but is 'media centre' an application or operating system?

TCannoyed

Have been comparing for the last couple of weeks and it seems spot on for me.
Im mainly going to be using it for net, music, photo storage, office bits and pieces. As for games im more into strategy games than those with stunning graphics (prefer to leave that to the consoles) so not too concerned.

Would i be able to upgrade graphics cards, memory etc without too much difficulty i f i need to?

brummybloke

you need to know if the mother board supports pci-e, this is for the graphics card you may wish to buy in future. most graphics cards ( infact all new ones from next year) will not be supporting agp x 8, only pci-e. so in 1 years time if you decided that you wanted age of empires 12 and it requires a tip top gfx card, you would be stuck.

again you need to check the mother board as , how many ram slots have you got? what ram does it support ? the newer ram is cheaper now than the older ram.

i had a comparable gfx card and i wanted to play age of empires 3, it was like a slug, very poor. i had to get a new gfx card as the one i had was now pants and did its job for 3 years. but of course as most gfx cards are now pci-e it left me quite limited as to which new card i got. other wise i would have had to get a new mother board, and new psu ( power unit) and graphics card. and probably new ram also. this would have ended up costing £350 , so i ended up getting a 6600gt, it cost £100 which i was not too pleased about.

you can only future proof so much , unless you have loads to throw at your machine, but pci-e is going to be here alot quicker as a standard than most things.

sammyy

I can't speak for the spec of this computer but I have MCE comp and I love it.What tuner does it have?If you get it you should look up https://www.thegreenbutton.comThe guys on the forum there have a wealth of knowledge concerning MCE and you will also find some fab plug-ins (free) on there too.

scorour

Dude wrote:

Excuse my ignorance but is 'media centre' an application of operating system?

Quick Answer...OS

Media Center is basically XP Prof with Media Center built in....It is different installation media and for the purpose of music, pictures, movies etc is great (escpecially when connect to a plasma ;-) )

It is a nice front end for the novice to use (my wife even loves it)