All in 1 pc, good idea or not?

UKTigerlily

Hi all, am buying a new desktop this week coming & have 3 options, 1 is an all in one, are they ok or not? I'm thinking if say the monitor breaks the whole thing'd need replacing not just a monitor? Does anyone have one? Yay or nay?

sabz3008

iMacs have always been excellent! ... Anyway...

The advantage to them is obviously the fact that they're space saving, convenient and sexy
The disadvantage is that you're not able to easily upgrade components, though you may be able to upgrade the RAM or such...You won't be able to upgrade it as you would on a standard desktop.

It's really up to what tickles your fancy really... Having an all-in-1 is like having a laptop in terms of capability of upgrading, reliability, etc...

Generally, Asus all-in-1's are really good, as are the HP ones! - When I worked at PCWorld, we sold many HP all in one's and none ever came back as far as I know!

My advice though:

GET A MAC!

UKTigerlily

lol from what i've seen Macs are way out of my budget sadly! They do look darn good though! I need it to watch online tv such as iPlayer but mostly to play Second Life, the requirements are here: http://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/ & I want it to meet the recommended rather than minimum requirements. I don't think that page has been updated in forever mind you.

PC World recommended these three as ones that will do the job:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/packard-bl-imedia-i4523uk-and-packard-bell-viseo-200-08189590-pdt.html

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/acer-aspire-z3731-21-5-touchscreen-all-in-one-pc-07677474-pdt.html

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/compaq-sg3-350uk-desktop-pc-with-20-monitor-09885841-pdt.html they said the first two are better than this but this will work too.

I want to spend ideally about £400, no more than £450 preferably with a monitor. Which will be best or are there others out there I can afford that are better?

My last pc was an iMedia 1302 Packard Bell & that ran it great for over 6yrs once I got 2GB ram in it & changed the graphics to nvidea (it had a non compatible graphics card). I'm told the graphics on all 3 of these will be fine.

Any help & advice greatfully recieved & if I do win the lotto I shall buy a Mac!

CoolHotCold

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/packard-bell-ixtreme-i6523-refurbished-desktop-pc-07604412-pdt.html

Add your own monitor.

asbokid

UKTigerlily wrote: »

Any help & advice gratefully received & if I do win the lotto I shall buy a Mac!

No need to win the Lotto. Modern macs are just run-of-the-mill x86 machines, just like your bog-standard Windows PC. You sound a very competent sort of fellow. I'm sure you could build your own "hackintosh" (mac-clone) and run OSX (leopard) on it for a fraction of the cost of buying a real Apple Mac. Go on! You know you want to!

UKTigerlily

asbokid wrote: »

No need to win the Lotto. Modern macs are just run-of-the-mill x86 machines, just like your bog-standard Windows PC. You sound a very competent sort of fellow. I'm sure you could build your own "hackintosh" (mac-clone) and run OSX (leopard) on it for a fraction of the cost of buying a real Apple Mac. Go on! You know you want to!

If being able to turn it on counts yup :rotfl:

Lleucu

had real probs with Sony All in One because it got too hot and fans failed ... 15 months after purchase .. fair play as we say in Wales the supplier gave us £500 out of the £800 it cost and we bought a bog standard tower which remains ice cold even when in heavy use .. the independent repair shop we consulted does not like All in Ones because as others have said are hard to repair .. did find towers are quite limited now in choice

esuhl

I'd steer clear of "all-in-one PCs" personally. They often seem over-priced, the cases are often small (limiting the potential to upgrade components and causing heat problems), and faulty components can be hard to replace if they need to be a very specific size to fit in the case...

Get a nice big case and select your components individually based on their own merit! That's what I'd do, anyway...

closed

Something wrong with the old one?

An all in one, is effectively an expensive laptop

sabz3008

UKTigerlily wrote: »

lol from what i've seen Macs are way out of my budget sadly! They do look darn good though! I need it to watch online tv such as iPlayer but mostly to play Second Life, the requirements are here: http://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/ & I want it to meet the recommended rather than minimum requirements. I don't think that page has been updated in forever mind you.

PC World recommended these three as ones that will do the job:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/packard-bl-imedia-i4523uk-and-packard-bell-viseo-200-08189590-pdt.html

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/acer-aspire-z3731-21-5-touchscreen-all-in-one-pc-07677474-pdt.html

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/compaq-sg3-350uk-desktop-pc-with-20-monitor-09885841-pdt.html they said the first two are better than this but this will work too.

I want to spend ideally about £400, no more than £450 preferably with a monitor. Which will be best or are there others out there I can afford that are better?

My last pc was an iMedia 1302 Packard Bell & that ran it great for over 6yrs once I got 2GB ram in it & changed the graphics to nvidea (it had a non compatible graphics card). I'm told the graphics on all 3 of these will be fine.

Any help & advice greatfully recieved & if I do win the lotto I shall buy a Mac!

Avoid the first one, it's a Pentium CPU - Totally outdated
Ideally, get yourself a Core i5, they're excellent processors... I see a poster has suggested a i5 Packard Bell base unit and to buy a separate monitor...That's a good suggestion, there's also this suggestion too if you don't mind sacrificing a bit of CPU power for more HD space and Memory:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/advent-firefly-fp3104-refurbished-desktop-pc-08623421-pdt.html

If you do get an all-in-one, then stick to a HP TouchSmart All-in-one, - though they appear to be slightly out of your budget... I wouldn't go for that Acer one though to be honest, poor specs, you could buy a notebook with higher specs at lower cost!