Upgrade options.....

[Bobsyeruncle]

my wife's work were replacing their work pc's and she was able to get one of the old ones free of charge.
It has 8gig of ram, 250gig hard drive and runs windows 7.
It uses a pentium G630 processor.
Will it be any good for basic editing on photoshop?
What upgrades would you suggest/think I would need?
My wife will use it for word etc, and I will use it for photo editing.

 

[rich_]

Have a go first and see how you go. It's a reasonably fast dual core processor. A good freebie!
If you feel that it's not fast enough then you could look to upgrade the processor to a quad core i5 or similar, But it may be a bit difficult if the workstation is small or doesn't have adequate power/cooling to run a higher wattage chip.
These were the range available for that particular processor socket- http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/29900/Sandy-Bridge#@Desktop
(There are also slightly newer generation CPUs that would fit, but $ wise it's probably not worth the investment compared to a ebay special on the older gen)

Your RAM should be fine.

If you find that the computer takes a long time to boot up or open applications, then you could also look into replacing the hard drive with a SSD version. They really make a massive difference to the computer. Typically its the most noticeable upgrade. It just won't affect Photoshop that much once you have opened the file up as PS predominantly cares about CPU rather than HD speed for typical digital camera file sizes.

 

[Sphinx]

As mentioned above - see how you go first - if its too slow in photoshop - you might be able upgrade the video card cheaply to improve performance and then add a SSD drive.

 

[Bobsyeruncle]

Thanks guys.
I'll give it a go and see what it's like.
It boots up quite quickly, so fingers crossed it's not too sluggish when using PS.