Desktop Help Please 🥴

Lizbetty

Hello everyone!

I've deliberated a bit too long and our desktop PC (essential for my husband's business but running on Windows 8. something) is starting to fail, it looks like it has days if we're lucky. 

I'm lost. I've googled and I am so confused. 

Budget is about £600 ish. We have decided on a desktop -

Needs to be Microsoft/Windows
For photo editing and music production/DAW use (daughter is a musician/photographer, now left college and so needs home facilities for earning some pennies)
Also for office use for my husband's business/admin

No gaming or anything like that. 

It needs to be reliable, mainly. Can anyone help with the sort of spec I should look for please? 

We do have a £360 gift card (for a faulty item we had under warranty) for Currys so are drawn to them, although their selection seems a bit limited. The spec google suggested is coming up with 1 pc at Currys which is £1k plus and out of stock anyway!

I would really appreciate any help, I'm so stressed! Many thanks 😊 

DullGreyGuy

Is it £600 inc the gift card or plus the gift card if from Curry's?

Do you want/need to replace the monitor etc or just the base unit?

p00hsticks

I'm not a techie expert, and I don't know if it would meet your daughters requirements, but I purchased one similar to this about eighteen months ago and have been very happy with it - I mainly use it for writing documents in Word and creating and  maintaining Excel spreadsheets. 

Buy Acer C22-1600 21.5in Celeron 8GB 256GB All-in-One PC | Desktops | Argos

Lizbetty

DullGreyGuy said:

Is it £600 inc the gift card or plus the gift card if from Curry's?

Do you want/need to replace the monitor etc or just the base unit?

That's a good question! We would rather keep the whole price £600 ish including the gift card at Currys for the desktop really, if we need to shop elsewhere we'd still go up to £600ish. 

Lizbetty

p00hsticks said:

I'm not a techie expert, and I don't know if it would meet your daughters requirements, but I purchased one similar to this about eighteen months ago and have been very happy with it - I mainly use it for writing documents in Word and creating and  maintaining Excel spreadsheets. 

Buy Acer C22-1600 21.5in Celeron 8GB 256GB All-in-One PC | Desktops | Argos

Thanks so much! I had a quick look, I'm not sure if it's powerful enough for what we're needing unfortunately as so far the recommended RAM for photo editing/music stuffs has varied between 8 and 16 GB and something about Quad Core (I don't know what this means, I just wrote it down along with some other numbers that vary a lot depending what I read)

I hope I'm wrong though as that one is on offer at Currys! 😄

DullGreyGuy

Lizbetty said:

DullGreyGuy said:

Is it £600 inc the gift card or plus the gift card if from Curry's?

Do you want/need to replace the monitor etc or just the base unit?

That's a good question! We would rather keep the whole price £600 ish including the gift card at Currys for the desktop really, if we need to shop elsewhere we'd still go up to £600ish. 

And new monitor or reuse the old one?

If without then Curry's have a couple of i5 towers for around your budget with 8gb ram and a reasonable sized  SSD. Your money will go further with a big box machine than an all in one and they are more upgradable/repairable in the future if a component fails or is the weak link. 

a 2022 i5 isnt going to set the world on fire but will be perfectly fine for business use, good at editing photos from phones/normal SLRs and OK at music editing depending on the number of tracks and effects used. I personally wouldnt go for the 2021 Celeron processor unless it's just for basic browsing/office apps. 

Lizbetty

DullGreyGuy said:

Lizbetty said:

DullGreyGuy said:

Is it £600 inc the gift card or plus the gift card if from Curry's?

Do you want/need to replace the monitor etc or just the base unit?

That's a good question! We would rather keep the whole price £600 ish including the gift card at Currys for the desktop really, if we need to shop elsewhere we'd still go up to £600ish. 

And new monitor or reuse the old one?

If without then Curry's have a couple of i5 towers for around your budget with 8gb ram and a reasonable sized  SSD. Your money will go further with a big box machine than an all in one and they are more upgradable/repairable in the future if a component fails or is the weak link. 

a 2022 i5 isnt going to set the world on fire but will be perfectly fine for business use, good at editing photos from phones/normal SLRs and OK at music editing depending on the number of tracks and effects used. I personally wouldnt go for the 2021 Celeron processor unless it's just for basic browsing/office apps. 

Thanks so much for this! Our monitor is so old, it was my husband's mother's and she died in 2016 - the speakers broke a good while ago so a new one would be best 😄

I had seen the all in ones, thanks for the advice on those. In all honesty, I was put off because we have cats and I can imagine them getting knocked over which worried me a bit, too!

I'll make a note of this and go and have a look at the ones with the things you've suggested, thank you again! This stuff just blows my mind so help is always appreciated 😊 🙏 

XzavierWalnut

I purchased a £1200 laptop from Currys about 3 years ago thinking if everything was in high numbers like the RAM, processor etc. it would be really fast.
It's not much better than my old £600 one.

fordyms

Unless you have no other option than Currys, my goto has always been CCL, for PC & spares.  Top class service in over 20 years of using them.  https://www.cclonline.com/pc/

Bonhomie

Lizbetty said:

Hello everyone!

I've deliberated a bit too long and our desktop PC (essential for my husband's business but running on Windows 8. something) is starting to fail, it looks like it has days if we're lucky. 

I'm lost. I've googled and I am so confused. 

Budget is about £600 ish. We have decided on a desktop -

Needs to be Microsoft/Windows
For photo editing and music production/DAW use (daughter is a musician/photographer, now left college and so needs home facilities for earning some pennies)
Also for office use for my husband's business/admin

No gaming or anything like that. 

It needs to be reliable, mainly. Can anyone help with the sort of spec I should look for please? 

We do have a £360 gift card (for a faulty item we had under warranty) for Currys so are drawn to them, although their selection seems a bit limited. The spec google suggested is coming up with 1 pc at Currys which is £1k plus and out of stock anyway!

I would really appreciate any help, I'm so stressed! Many thanks 😊 

Failing in what manner? If it's just the HDD failing; if you are quick you can clone it to an SSD and be up and running very quickly. Faster than before. 

Cisco001

p00hsticks said:

I'm not a techie expert, and I don't know if it would meet your daughters requirements, but I purchased one similar to this about eighteen months ago and have been very happy with it - I mainly use it for writing documents in Word and creating and  maintaining Excel spreadsheets. 

Buy Acer C22-1600 21.5in Celeron 8GB 256GB All-in-One PC | Desktops | Argos

Not fit for purpose for photo editing...

With £600, you should looking at something with Ryzen 7 5700G or i7 12 gen or i5 13th gen with 16GB RAM + SSD. (prepare to upgrade RAM yourself)
currys has limited option...