looking to buy a new desktop, spending up to £300.

use it for general work, some website stuff, photoshop, illustrator etc. not super massive images or files, but my current amd athlon 64 3200 2.2ghz with 1.5gb ram is feeling it a bit these days and the hd is getting full.

can anyone tell me what would be the best processors to go looking for around that price; amd again, intel?

and then the mac question, i’ve seen basic mac mini a bit over 400quid, worth the extra spend for a basic one?

Bought a Lenovo i5 H330 (I think) from PC World. Didn’t need a monitor. Upgraded the memory, which was a pain, and use a 2T NAS drive. I deliberately went for the faster processor and smaller HD.

Seems OK, nicely made, etc. Windows 7 is a fine OS. But I was about as excited as buying any other domestic appliance (for which the usual answer is one up from the base Miele).

Don’t get me started on macs. My original iMac is upstairs awaiting a new PSU so I can take off the files and put it in a skip!

Don’t get me started on macs. My original iMac is upstairs awaiting a new PSU so I can take off the files and put it in a skip

How old is it, exactly?
I ask only because I have an eight year old PowerBook, a mate has an ‘Anglepoise’ iMac that’s about as old, and we have two old Mac towers at work, one made in 1999, the other slightly newer, both of which still work, the newer one is still in use as a file server to our image-setter.
I fail to see the point in replacing the PSU only to dump it, that’s just nuts. Sell it, Macs have second-hand value, unlike PC’s.
I could show you a room at work with two long shelves lined with the carcasses of PC’s that have just died, there must be over a dozen in there, quite apart from the twenty to thirty I’ve seen thrown out in the eight years I’ve worked there.
Back to the OP, I have a Mac Mini I bought last year, one of the last of the 2010 models, which I had modded by the shop.
I had the optical taken out and I bought an external drive, and had a 750Gb HDD installed, along with an extra 2Gb RAM, so it’s now got 1.1Tb of storage, and 4Gb RAM. It now sits just under one corner of my Sony Bravia, with an HDMI cable to the telly, a TOSlink optical cable into my Yamaha amp, and I use the telly as a 40″ monitor and control my iTunes library from Remote on either my iPhone or iPad.
And it all works beautifully.

Are you already using (and own) Photoshop, Illustrator etc on a PC? If so, the expense of having to buy this all over again (plus any other s/w) for a Mac is gonna require some serious justification IMO. Unless you make a fair old wad of course.

My original iMac is upstairs awaiting a new PSU so I can take off the files and put it in a skip!

Can’t you just pull the drive and mount it as a slave in a new machine? Seems wasteful to buy a PSU just to throw it away.

I was being a little facetious. It’s the last of the G5’s that Apple produced, then instantly rendered non-compatible with future OS upgrades with the intel chipsets. Power supply issues are rife with this model. And yes I can take out the hard drive.

It and a few other Apple issues left me somewhat jaded with the Apple experience. And I wrote my thesis on an original Macintosh running LaTeX.