Advice on a new desktop pc

bellybob

Is this a good spec for £400
320gb hard drive
4gb ddr3 ram
X2 250 athlon 3 mhz dual core
Dvdrw
512 graphics card
Windows 7
Kbd mouse
Wireless
19 screen
I have no real idea so could do with some advice please:)

Knarf44

What do you want to use it for?

Do you have a link to the specific webpage where you found it?

JasX

sounds reasonable, a good sense check you can use is hop onto the dell website and compare to whatever the bog standard dell 'special offer' is to check if its in a similar ball park.

19" is probably a little small for a screen these days do you need a new one? gould you re-use and get a slightly better spec going for box only? for £400 it is good to see it has a separate graphics card rather than integrated (although without further details I'm expecting it to be fairly low end).

bellybob

General home use wife is a teacher so spreadsheets and word docs, kids for internet etc, me for watching live football, browsing internet, and storing videos and photos. The quote I have had is from a local business basically asked what I could get for a budget of £400 and this is what they came back with.

bellybob

Had a laptop before that has died on me so dont have a screen. I will have a look on the Dell website though thanks for the advice.

bellybob

This is what Dell have in my price rang on there website but without a screen. Any views out there as to which is better?
intel pentium dual core E5500 (2.80GHZ 800 MHZ 2MB
WINDOWS 7 PREMIUM
INTERGRATED INTEL GRAPHACIS MEDIA ACCELERATOR X4500 GRAPHICS
2048MB DUAL CHANNEL DDR3 (2X1024) MEMORY
7200 RPM SATA HARD DRIVE
DVD +/-RW DRIVE WITH DVD BURN SOFTWARE

JasX

bellybob wrote: »

This is what Dell have in my price rang on there website but without a screen. Any views out there as to which is better?
intel pentium dual core E5500 (2.80GHZ 800 MHZ 2MB - very similar to your quote
WINDOWS 7 PREMIUM -identical
INTERGRATED INTEL GRAPHACIS MEDIA ACCELERATOR X4500 GRAPHICS -likely to be worse than your 1st quote
2048MB DUAL CHANNEL DDR3 (2X1024) MEMORY -noticably worse
7200 RPM SATA HARD DRIVE -no idea without size in GB (these things only cost £40 in any case)
DVD +/-RW DRIVE WITH DVD BURN SOFTWARE -these are all the same

on the face of it your first quote is the better spec, other things you might want to factor in is after sales support/gurantee's/build quality, availability of drivers for download in future etc.

Only two issues you may face given your useage is
-a 320GB hard disk isn't that big these days and likely to quickly fill up esp with large video files, perhaps a bigger or 2nd hard disk would be worth considering. a 1TB (1000GB) will set you back under £50 -or perhaps less than that if the local company will let you swap out the 320GB and pay the difference. on the other hand with a 2nd drive you could keep a copy on each physical drive and stay backed up that way.

(I highly recommend this specific one from a performance perspective - Samsung F3 1TB, model HD103SJ for £40 http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173804 )

-if your wife wants to use spreadsheets etc she'll need a copy of 'office' type software, lowest cost option is downloading open office for free which works with and can save things as MSOffice file types. Alternatively as a teacher she may have access to a reduced cost copy of microsoft office direct from microsoft under some 'education' discount scheme.

bellybob

Thanks Jasx really appreciate the advice given.

gonzo127

i agree with Jas on this the first quote does appear to be better as standard,

the other thing to consider (of course it all costs) on top of the hard drive upgrade would be paying a bit more for a bigger monitor as a cheap
19 inch monitor will be about £80
22 inch monitor will be about £100
24 inch monitor will be about £130

to get one of these upgrades (if you cant afford to stretch your budget) it might be worth while asking to dump the graphics card and go with the intergrated chipset on the motherboard so long as that chipset is ok which as ever if you get the details on it we will be able to advise a bit better, which could free up ~£20-30 and if you find you need more graphics power that is a very easy upgrade,

same with RAM as this is also a very easy and generally cheap upgrade to do yourself you might wish to consider dropping to 2gb instead of 4 and freeing up another ~£30

Mista_C

With your wife being a teacher, before purchasing MS Office, I would check with the facility she teaches in. Many educational facilities work under a bulk licensing system, some of these licences allow staff to install Office on their home PCs on the agreement that on leaving their employment you must uninstall the software.

bellybob

Thanks Gonzo sound advice I will bear this in mind. - Bellybob