As per the title, not been into hardware for ages, so have no idea what worth buying?
Point me in the right direction please, for a desktop that just does the job (browsing, itunes, porn, the basic's), but will last the next few years without struggling.

Have been running a 2.8 Intel 620 series with bugger all ram running XP that was fine but latest AV's (AVG/MS Essentials) are killing it. The price of 4GB's of ram is half way to buying a cheap intel 6500 with 2Gb of ram, but is it worth it or worth spending just a bit more…
Also have Windows 7 waiting to be installed too.

i3?

I would say i3 is still a notch above Deore level – PC manufacturers are still putting out sub Quad Core chipsets and theyre still good bits of kit.

Saying that, Im just about to buy an i5 unit which I hope will last for the next 5-10 years.

i3.

Also, 10 years? Are you upgrading from a p3 or something?

Ditch the Windows and install Ubuntu, your PC will be good enough for many a year to come.
I have a P4 3.0GH on the slot 775 or something similar. Good enough to live on STW.

Ubuntu runs iTunes these days then, does it?

Ubuntu has Rhythmbox, which some say is better than iTunes.

Cougar, you appear to post semi knowledgeable comments on IT threads, which is a nice contribution. However you habit of slagging other peoples comments is a bit sad.

Happy with Windoze, as it's my job to support it, familiarity help.
Lad at work (before redundancy) mentioned that he was under the impression the i3 is a cut down i5, a-la celeron, was he wrong?

What give with the Dell site? Couldn't find any i3's last night, but did find an i5 for less than £350, now I can't find it and have located the i3's!

Well, an i3 is a cut down i5 no more or less than an i5 is cut down i7 which is a Westmere core Xeon less two cores and a second QPI interface….

CPU speed is not the limiting factor for most tasks on a computer. If you're building to a budget, save £100 on getting an i5, get an i3 instead and spend the savings elsewhere. I'd recommend putting it toward a bigger monitor, or £100 will about get you a decent KB & mouse. Any of these three things will improve your experience using the computer more than the cpu.

Fair enough, happy with my 22" Llyama CRT monitor, MS keyboard & mouse, (lasted over 6 years – just don't do any bacterial checks on it), just want a decent base unit for not a huge outlay, as my redundancy money will only last so long especially if I keep hitting it.

Aha found the i5 Vostro 430 for £350 on the Dell small & medium business section, looks quite good (Win 7 32bit might need upgrading?) & I could add extra memory in, cheaper than dell will.

I found win7 made my Pentium m 1.6 run faster than ever, so in itself that may help over xp

It's all this flash crap that keeps my old fashioned cpu at 100% 🙁

don't forget to look in the dell outlet for some cracking deals.

I also have found Comodo firewall and anti virus to be nice and lean and lets my netbook (atom 1.6Ghz) run happily. Just installed AVG and Zonealarm on the GF's P4 with Xp and had to turn off real time virus scanning to make the machine useable. Will see how it goes, but will prob end up putting Comodo on there too (just put AVG and AZ on to see what they are like these days).

CP I've checked it before now (for laptops), and found the deals on the main site to be better value, to be honest

AVG is terrible now, hense why I went to MS essentials, though it turns out if didn't disable Defender, so that may have been the problem. Avast is normally what I install at the moment, still pretty good IMO