Want a new desktop computer for the spare room

Budget 500 quid

Need whole set up- just junked my previous home build from 2002…… Terminal mobo failure- although i kept my hdds. But the monitor was shocking as were the mouse and keyboard.

Wants – 19 or 21 inch monitor.

Windows os ( notice some come with freedos)

Needs an optical drive and at least a 1tb hdd and be reasonably quiet,

Nice to haves – webcam , dual monitor ability , be a decent brand- never had good luck with acer – but had great luck with many hp or ibm products…..

To be used for making powerpoints for mrs t-r work , me working. From home on word and excel , surfing web , photo editing and storage , watching the odd movie etc , nothing taxing, i dont need a gaming powerhouse.

Dont want to home brew this time , i was never entirely happy with the old workhorse, always ran warm as hell and i know even less about computers than i did then, and i only knew enough to be dangerous back then 🙂

Dell outlet or zoostorm?

You could laptop it and plug a monitor in?

Any particular reason to be desktop? Most of your requirements would easily be handled by a laptop these days and be much more versatile. You can nearly get your screen size requirement too.

If you want to go desktop, I’d make the most of the fixed position by having at least a 24″ display.

Be worth keeping a look on dell outlet over the next couple of weeks, there will be lots of returns 🙂

Ive had a look about nothing really jumps out at me tbh things have moved on alot…….

My last build was a 3.8ghz pentium……..they all seem to be much lower speeds but multicore….what does that actually mean ? Quad core 1.8ghz – is that basicallly 4 x 1.8ghz ?

Are zoostrom any good ? I noticed they were cheap on ebuyer , specs seemdd bugger than the rest but i also remember an advent laptop i bought back in the dark ages hat had bigger numbers than the equivalent machine but was th ebiggest steaming turd you ever saw !

Also re laptop and plugging it in – nope. The whole point of the desktop is to have somewhere ergonomically correct to work that cannot be moved to the sofa and be the root cause of rsi by my mrs trying to do her work on the sofa.

Good plan on the dell outlet ‘ will keep an eye open. Not sure i can get a 24 in budget without realy scrimping on the baseunit. I have twin 21s at work and im happy 🙂

Quad core 1.8ghz – is that basicallly 4 x 1.8ghz ?

Yep, pretty much. Front side bus had also been done away with so generally much much faster.

Maybe have a look at some of the all in ones if you’re after a fixed setup. Reduces clutter and generally just the power cable.

Ah ok makes sense.

I like the look and image of the all in ones – how ever im a bit sceptical of buying a considerably lower spec computer to gain the form factor.it does seem annoying that economy of scale now means its generally cheaper to buy a laptop than a desktop for a given spec…… Complete flip around from way back when.

Basically i have to drop down from 8gb ram and. 1tb hdd to 4 gb ram and a 500gb hdd…. Ok not deal breakers but i have abig desk and the box can live under itwhere my old case used to live , a wireless mouse and keyboard would go a long way to tidying up my set up.

But i am digging the ide of a big monitor for streaming tv and movies when the mrs is watching crap like downton in the living room”

Something like a Scan v10i with a SSD and 8gb ram upgrades maybe. Go Intel over amd, cooler and more efficient. An i3 4170 or similar is plenty of power. SSD for operating system is a must have.

You could go laptop with separate monitor and keyboard and mouse BUT keep the laptoppluggd in such an award way in a draw that it was not tempting to unplug everything and take it to the sofa?

http://www.misco.co.uk/product/2360334/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-E73-Small-Form-Factor-Intel-Core-i7-4790S-8GB-RAM-1TB-HDD-DVDplus-RW-DL-Windows-7-Professional-Windows-8-1-Pro-flyer-Desktop-PC

I buy a lot of IT equipment for work, there’s rarely ‘sales’ per-se in the channel I buy from, prices move about daily – but since about Nov the price of Fujitsu desktops has been falling quiet a bit – word is that they’re selling off all thier 4th gen Intel processor based stuff to replace with 6th Gen very soon – they’re still very good machines – typical everything we buy comes in with 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM and you build up from there.

6th gen stuff has got me in a pickle – it’s like 650b it doesn’t really matter if you want it or not, soon you won’t have any choice – it only seems to work with DDR4 RAM which costs double for no real benefit (to me anyway) and whilst they’re more energy efficient and that very commendable – it does mean they seem to come with low powered PSUs a total pain if the end user wants to run a GPU.

Anyway, I wholeheartedly recommend Fujistu desktops, we’ve sold hundreds and hundreds and not one has failed, they’re well put together and can be upgraded easily as they don’t need fancy cabling like HP stuff and there room to fit stuff in them unlike say Dell and unlike some of the cheaper brands they don’t skimp on the less obviously stuff like disc drives and power supplies like Acer.

wysiwyg – Member

http://www.misco.co.uk/product/2360334/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-E73-Small-Form-Factor-Intel-Core-i7-4790S-8GB-RAM-1TB-HDD-DVDplus-RW-DL-Windows-7-Professional-Windows-8-1-Pro-flyer-Desktop-PC

I’m curently typing on a 12-13yr old (albeit Trigger’s broom of a) PC, so know little of modern stuff, but I’m not going to beat that for the money, am I?
I was looking at spending about £300, and the numbers all look good in that link, plus Lenovo has been mentioned as a quality brand on here more than once.
I should just buy it, shouldn’t I?

For giggles, my current machine is (I think, the original Athlon XP2000 was broken by the ‘pooter shop) a Sempron 2300, relatively recently upgraded to 1GB of RAM and has a 40GB and a 20GB hard drive.
It’s even got a 3.5″ floppy drive!

It seems an excellent deal. Monitor wise cheap n cheerful or good? Your sizes not a bit small?

My current eBay machine is an ancient old dell. Can just about shunt photos from my 7d about

If you’ve got Clubcard vouchers, Tesco Direct are doubling up the voucher value on some desktops in their current sale.
E.g 18.5 monitor, 1TB, so not quite your spec, is £199
http://www.tesco.com/direct/acer-xc-703-185-all-in-one-desktop-pc-intel-celeron-4gb-ram-1tb-black/638-2320.prd?pageLevel=&skuId=638-2320#product-details-container

Or 21.5 monitor, i5, 2TB for £499
http://www.tesco.com/direct/zoostorm-215-monitor-with-tower-core-i5-4460-16gb-2tb-windows-10/186-0165.prd?pageLevel=&skuId=186-0165

Both of those are included in the Clubcard boost offer, so up to half price if you have enough vouchers, and they have other stuff on sale

WRT the processor itself…

For the uses you’re talking about I’d not be looking for a Quadcore Intel chip, but a dualcore with a higher clockspeed.

4cores at 1ghz will only equal 1 core at 4ghz if the task can be split up perfectly. This is confined to straight-up calculations, as opposed to mixed workloads.

Chrome, Word etc etc will not scale properly [barely at all in fact] Image manipulation or 3D rendering might, but for domestic workloads this will be rare as hen’s teeth.

Probably cheaper, too.

Hyperthreading is worth having, if you can afford it.

I was looking at spending about £300, and the numbers all look good in that link, plus Lenovo has been mentioned as a quality brand on here more than once.
I should just buy it, shouldn’t I?

The only caveat with that is it’s SFF. So almost certainly there will be no spare power points for additional drives or room in the case for much expansion. You’ll also be limited to low profile cards, which might be an issue if you want to stick a new graphics card in it. Maybe only two DIMM slots too. (I have a Lenovo Edge 71 sitting here which is an identical case.)

You can get a skylake i3, 8gig ram, 1tb HDD, K&M, plus 22inch 1080p monitor from ocuk for £500.

Chrome, Word etc etc will not scale properly [barely at all in fact]

Sure about that? You’re telling me all that JavaScript and video whatnot on a modern webpage happens in a single thread?

Pretty much. Certainly in Windows 2C is fairly fast and many applications are largely single threaded.

Actually IIRC Chrome does split threads, but there really shouldn’t be any problems with a modern i3 or i5, just avoid any crippled Celerons with too little cache.

Most new machines should offload much of the video demand to a GPU as well.

Single threaded performance still matters, remember those anniversary edition Pentiums that could clock up to 4.5, they were really useful 🙂

Check out these guys, recommended to me on here and they were very competitive on price at the time – and honest and helpful in buying advice on phone…

http://www.aria.co.uk/Systems

Ccl computers are also worth a look.

Ok, so I’m going to buy a laptop (which I hate), how does this one fare:

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/lenovo-g50-15-6-laptop-silver-10137557-pdt.html

I have nothing to add bar http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01444HY2Y?tag=hotukdeals03-21

good spy wysiwig.

that looks like the one for me :d

bought.,

bit pissed that “order in next 3 hours for delivery on the 30th”

turns into “order in the next 24 hours for delivery on the 31st”

(and the cost of the delivery remains the same)

guess they mean you dont live in the greater london area…..

Amazon used to be very good at delivery to my house on their next day and i didnt mind paying for it.

Still it was cheap and i didnt have to put up with pcworlds absolutely terrible upselling sales patter and garbage aftersales should i need it…

Sweet

The 31st turned into the 5th of january by the time the departure email came through so an email was launched in their general direction about the 8 quid i paid to have it delivered in “one” day when there would be someone in the house to reciept…..

I fully expect by the time i get a “we are delivering your parcel” from hdn or yodel as they are otherwise known…… It will say 31st of january or something equally rediculous.

I would make a quip about finding it in the hedge or the ditch sometime mid january but my local yodel drivers very good.

cheers for the headup wysiwyg.

Cracking machine for what i needed.

Quick to boot to desktop and is actually usable at that point – my old machine needed about 20 minutes to warm up to usable !

touch screen is actually responsive and intuitive to use , windows 10 works really well on the touchscreen system.

as as surprise it came with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse which was a welcome surprise.

Screen is very good – maybe could have been slightly brighter and thespeakers are really good as well.

Very impressed with what 350 gets you.

oh and it was delivered on the 31st despite amazon saying otherwise (but i did get my refund on postage as they had given me 3 different delivery dates – so when am i supposed to stay in to sign for it?)