Computer Spec Help Please

Brighty

Hello all

I am looking at buying a pc and have spec'd up two from dell at about £600

It will be used for

General home office stuff
Broadband internet
Burning cd's
Managing my music collection on an mp3 player (around 200 albums to upload)

Also as a mechanical design engineer i wouldn't mind loading on cad packages autocad and solidworks plus perhap proengineer

Spec's are as follows

System A
£621
Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 640 with HT technology (3.20GHz, 800MHz fsb, 2MB cache
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
Free - Dell Colour Printer 725!
1024MB Dual Channel DDR2 400MHz (2x512) Memory!
250GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache!
16x max. DVD+/-RW Drive!
Dell E196FP 19" Midnight Grey (TCO99) Flat Panel Monitor!
256MB ATI Radeon® X600 HyperMemory graphics card!
Integrated Audio with Dolby Digital 7.1 capability !

System B
£592
Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 640 with HT technology (3.20GHz, 800MHz fsb, 2MB cache
Intel® Pentium® D Processor 820 with DualCore Technology (2.80GHz,800MHz fsb,2x1MB cache)
No option
Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2!
Free - Dell Colour Printer 725!
1024MB Dual Channel DDR2 400MHz (2x512) Memory!
160GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache!
16x max. DVD+/-RW Drive!
Dell E196FP 19" Midnight Grey (TCO99) Flat Panel Monitor!
Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950!
Integrated Audio with Dolby Digital 7.1 capability !

The differences between the two are

System A has XP Home, 250GB Hard Drive and 256MB ATI Radeon X600 video card for £621

System B has XP Prof, 160GB Hard Drive and integrated intel graphics video card for £592

My questions are

Good value systems or not?

What’s the dif to me between XP home and prof?

How big is a 160G drive? Will I fill it easily? Do I need 250MB

What’s a video card do? Which do I need?

Also I could change the processor from a P4 640 to a P4 630 saving myself £35.25 (system A only)

Or change from the P4 640 to PD 820 dual core saving myself £23.50

Which would be best for me and best value

Any info much appreciated

Thanks

Brighty

John_Gray

You don't seem to be doing anything demanding that would need lots of CPU power, memory or hard disk space (apart from the music collection). I would say any/either of those would do.

CPU speed doesn't tend to be especially critical. But faster is faster.

For what you say you want, you don't need XP Pro. Briefly, this is for networking, joining domains, remote desktop, etc. See more details and check there's nothing in XP Pro you need.

If you got 1024 MB of memory you would never need to upgrade (says he!). You would probably be quite happy with 512 MB. (Check how much more 1024 MB would be than 512 MB. Is it worth another £30 to you (say)?)

Hard disks fill up faster than you think. Is your music collection HUGE? That said, I am using but 19 GB on my hard disk, with lots of large downloaded software (but no music).

John

T4i

Brighty wrote:

Hello all

I am looking at buying a pc and have spec'd up two from dell at about £600

It will be used for

General home office stuff
Broadband internet
Burning cd's
Managing my music collection on an mp3 player (around 200 albums to upload)

Also as a mechanical design engineer i wouldn't mind loading on cad packages autocad and solidworks plus perhap proengineer

Apart from the CAD this is real basic computing. I would recommend you use DVD's to back the mp3 up.....then if you have a HDD failure you have a hard copy, also easier to take around with u. Buying a faster CPU or more RAM wont give you better speed/performance to transfer MP3's to MP3 player. If the MP3 player is USB then its prolly USB2.0 standard and most computers have built in USB2.0 controllers now anyhoow.

Broadband net, burning CD's and home office stuff doesnt need lots of power to run, you would be quite fine with a 2Gig CPU and 512 RAM - if that.

I cant comment on CAD as i've never had any experience of it, but looking at required system specs here > http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5158199 it looks like the more resources the better!

Its even saying 1.5Gig or more of RAM would be preferred......Suppose it all depends on how often/how serious you are with CAD.