Best PC for budget

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Steve T

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Budget about £400.00, whats the best desk top I can buy, or have a go at building for this sort of money. Just want something pretty fast for photo and home video editing, not gameing.

At the moment I am using this old comp on Vista which I don't like (my xp comp just died)

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...portFAQ&prodSeriesId=3644723&prodTypeId=12454

How much improvement on this could I get for that budget.


I've looked at the Zoostorm stuff but don't really know enough to make a confident choice. They seem a bit raw somehow
 
For a step up on the one you are using, you need to be looking at a PC with an i5-2xxx part in it, with as much memory as you can put in it. You'll also want to be running Win7. To buy the parts alone will probably cost close to £400 (assuming reuse of monitor/mouse/keyboard etc) but you'll also have to factor in the cost of the OS which will be about £80.

If you could stretch to £500, you'd be sorted. If you want to build it would cost approx the same, but you're likey to get better spec components.
 
As arad85 says you may need to stretch yourself to £500 or so. I'm no fan of PC World but they do currently have an i5 Lenovo for £479 - see http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/lenovo-h330-desktop-pc-11875742-pdt.html

But, the PC you already have should be able to cope with what you're doing, (unless the video editing is pretty heavy) with Windows 7 installed in favour of Vista.
 
PhotoMonty said:
But, the PC you already have should be able to cope with what you're doing, (unless the video editing is pretty heavy) with Windows 7 installed in favour of Vista.
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Put Win 7 - 64 (£70) and possibly replace the memory to 8G (£80 max, it would depend what's in there but you'd need 4x2GByte modules) would be my cheap upgrade on that machine.

If you were building your own, you could move Win 7 to the new machine if you buy a retail version. I have moved an OEM version before now and that was allowed by Microsoft themselves (had to revalidate against M$ servers), even though it is supposedly against the ELUA but up to you if you wanted to chance it for £40. :shrug:
 
Dell have Vostro towers (no monitor) with i5 2400 processors staring at £299 +delivery +VAT (£329 +delivery +VAT with a 1Gb graphics card), so within your budget if you re-use your existing monitor. They're listed under the "small business" section, but you don't need to be a business to buy. Only 2Gb RAM at that price, but they're easy and cheap to upgrade.
 
Thanks guys, I think I will do the upgrade on this machine,W7 and 8gig of ram as Andy suggested. The only thing I'm not sure of is that the specs say it supports two monitors at the same time, but there is only one port. I would like to use two monitors so, what do I do to it to get this sorted. I have an old 'Radeon hd 3450' from my knackered xp machine that has two ports but not sure if I can fit it in this machine. :thinking: can you have two graphics cards in the same comp?
 
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