It seems it is about time we replaced our aging desktop. Not hearing a lot of good things about windows 8 desktops, so what are the alternatives out there ?
Will be using MS office, some video editing and 2 monitors at some point.
Are reconditioned windows 7 xeon workstations worth a look?

Windows 8.1 is much better, so play with that. Or if you get the profession version of 8.1 you can downgrade to 7.

Win 10 will be a free upgrade.

You haven’t given much info, but probably an i5 or i7 would be fine, Xeon chips are stupidly expensive new*.

Budget? RAM/Drive space required? As for multiple monitors any reasonable current gen NVIDIA or AMD card will do that, and if you use Adobe software you may be able to get acceleration using the card.

*in passing, if your current machine is x58/socket 1366 then you can get hold of very cheap X56x0 Xeons as an upgrade. Let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction.

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/new-desktop-pc-what-make-and-spec

Windows8 is OK IMO, and you’ll soon be able to upgrade to W10 which looks a lot more like 7 on the preview version

(or if you can find a cheap old machine with W7 on it and acceptable parts for you you’ll be able to upgrade that to W10 for free soon, too)

BigEaredBiker of this parish sold my friend a Z800 workstation at a reasonable price, but they are a bit specialist, really. 48GB RAM??!

8.1 is just fine and you’ll get a free upgrade to 10 if you want it.

What is wrong with your current pc and what spec is it?