Modern websites vs old computers

[trillian]

I am browsing this site at the moment with a P4 1.8Ghz machine with 512MB of Ram (and bus speeds to go with it).

Holy guacamole, how did we ever cope with computers this slow!

So why the unpleasant trip down memory lane I hear you ask? My main desktop machine has decided to go awol. I think it's the graphics card as I was getting intermittent black screens yesterday, then this morning it started OK but went black and would not recover. (I tried re-seating everything and even cleaning the connectors but no joy). And this is after my much loved Rock laptop died on me about two months ago :apologetic:

I will be borrowing a graphics card to try and hopefully I can get it working again but the good news is my company has offered to buy me a new machine.:joyous: But I kinda have to do it on a budget as they'll only go to about £800.00 so after being really out of the loop for a few years on what's hot and what's not I am now shopping around to see what I can get in that range. I was hoping for i7, Asus mobo, lots of Ram etc. but may have to curb my enthusiasm and aim for i5. I have had a browse on Overclockers just to get an idea. (I don't really do gaming but need something to do video editing so usually the spec is roughly similar).

[RcRotaryMadness]

...for £800 these days you should be able to get a decent home pc machine...

I've recently bought a LG 24" LED monitor, that was £150 (now £130)
Microsoft keyboard & mouse (£40)
Packard Bell Quad Core 2.3GHz Windows 7 Tower off ebay £200 (at the time (3 or so years ago) it was slighty used but as new condition - still running well now apart from the occasional trojan/virus!)

[kylelnsn]

Or ask if you can add a bit of money and get a MAC!!!

[Lynx.1677]

Add a whole heap of money and you may just be able to get a Mac. :)

[trillian]

Yeah, I can't afford to add a heap of money at the moment. I already had to buy a new monitor after my laptop died and I moved back into the desktop. So that's a bit over £200.00 I'm already out on computer related stuff this year. (plus I still need to get a new laptop)

In the past I have always just bought the components and built my own machine but since the company wants me to have something new and super reliable and everything I want to get something already built and comes with a warranty.

[Swashbuckler]

Dabs do some pretty good mobo,cpu,memory bundles think my last one cost about £200. Buy a good branded power supply 600W+ £100ish. Spend the rest on graphics card/s, top of the range radeon or nvidia if budget allows, the next model down often represent the best value for money though. Use your old case and optical drive. I would add a 120gb even 64gb solid state drive for the OS and use you old hdd for storage/installation of large progs. Look to upgrade the hdd to a raid array if you do a lot of file shifting and want speed and /or data protection.

All the individual components are covered by warranty, whats the difference? If you buy a combo they have tested it all to play nicely.

[trillian]

[QUOTE=Swashbuckler;882912]Dabs do some pretty good mobo,cpu,memory bundles think my last one cost about £200. Buy a good branded power supply 600W+ £100ish. Spend the rest on graphics card/s, top of the range radeon or nvidia if budget allows, the next model down often represent the best value for money though. Use your old case and optical drive. I would add a 120gb even 64gb solid state drive for the OS and use you old hdd for storage/installation of large progs. Look to upgrade the hdd to a raid array if you do a lot of file shifting and want speed and /or data protection.

All the individual components are covered by warranty, whats the difference? If you buy a combo they have tested it all to play nicely.[/QUOTE]

I bought some of the bundles from either Dabs or EBuyer some years ago. I'll have a look and see what those guys are doing now. I am considering the SSD route for the system drive because I already have lots of fairly big drives for storage and a 1TB external drive.

The first thing I must do is revive the machine I have and ideally I'd like to keep it running on the network but we'll see how it goes.

[Gixxer]

A "P4 1.8Ghz machine with 512MB of Ram" is more than capable of browsing this site (and 99.9% of websites). If you're having problems viewing these pages, there's something wrong with the machine (apart from its age).

[Streetluge Chris]

This seems like a lot of pc for the money I had a medion for 10 years.
[url=http://www.aldi.co.uk/uk/html/offers/special_buys3_25892.htm]ALDI - Thursday Special Buys 2nd August 2012[/url]

[jimmyhorns]

If you are buying on a budget here are a few tips, they have done me well over the last 18 or so years of building my own pcs:

Never look at this years technology.
Never go for top spec
Always make a balanced machine
Look carefully at what is actually slowing a machine down
Unless you are doing a lot of gaming, a super-dooper graphics card is money down the drain.

I would suggest having a look at an SSD hard drive though, something relatively small (I have 80Gb) to run your OS and applications from. Then have something bigger (and slower) for storage. I was amazed at what a difference that made.

Im currently running a Q6600 quad core, which is now 5 years old, but is lightning fast (overclocked), has quick memory (6Gb) and combined with the SSD significantly out-performs most 'modern' systems that are out there for sub £1000.