Anyone tried a super budget PC?

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I've bought quite a few of this type of machine from Ebay and they all work fine within their limitations.

These are Legacy machines so you can fit Win 10 but you may have problems upgrading the RAM because these older machines may only have 2 RAM slots which limits expansion.

There are also a limited number of PCIe slots.

I personally would go for an i3 with 16GB and USB3 if you can find one like that.

The memory also usually has to match the machine so buying the setup you need upfront is usually best.
 
I bought a budget laptop 4 years ago as I wanted something light to carry as I was travelling by train to several venues around the UK for work and didn't want to lug the large, heavy Dell laptop I have around with me. The sub-£300 laptop did it's job, enabling me to work on and edit PowerPoint presentations as required, and as an emergency back up in case the training venue's laptop failed.

However, it was so slow in comparison to my pro-quality Dell (simply no comparison at all now since I've had the Dell converted to SSD hard drive!). The budget HP laptop takes ages to download and process Windows updates, which, as I don't use it very often, seems to be mostly what it wants to do! Yes, it did the job it was bought for, but it also taught me a valuable lesson, I'd rather buy a good, used computer with a good quality processor and motherboard in it and fit an SSD drive to it as soon as I could afford to (if it's not already got one) than buy a cheap 'budget' one again. It's just not worth the frustration factor!
 
It would be terribly slow beyond any hope and can't even connect to any proper screen. Besides it will rack up electricity bills like you can't imagine. It's about 2005-8 vintage; which would be great for wine, ok for whiskey.
It's a lab / instrument pc where you only need absolute basics
 
Core 2 Duo?

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I see some refurbished Dells on Amazon with more reasonable i5/i7 configurations, 240GB SSDs and 8GB RAM, starting at £125 without a monitor.
 
While it won't win any races, that Dell looks to be fully capable of what you want as spec'd. I think you'll be able to fit a second HDD behind the unused FDD bay if you need more storage space, but I suspect the current memory will be 4x1Gb/2x2Gb (depending on the board layout), so 8Gb/16Gb will be the max you could fit, but you may have to remove (some of?) the current sticks to do so. PSU in those small form factor cases is generally 240-250W.
 
I see some refurbished Dells on Amazon with more reasonable i5/i7 configurations, 240GB SSDs and 8GB RAM, starting at £125 without a monitor.
I spotted those too and I'd probably have had a think about one of those if I wanted a budget solution, although, with a half decent new screen that's probably going to be triple the cost of the OPs original suggestion... however, quality is often remembered long after the price has been forgotten!
 
ive got a used lenove slim desktop that runs my music media system it was 99 quid from amazon, came with windows pro 8gb and a 256gh HDD which i swapped for an SSD for about 45 quid and it is very good
 
I need a spare PC which will just be used for running visual studio on. I'm quite surprised to see these things on amazon


Bung a bit more memory in and upgrade it to win 10 pro and it would seem to suit me fine. Just wondering if anyone has had any experience of these super cheap builds before?
I have bought a few Dell Optiplex PCs over the years, they are cheap & generally reliable and spares are easily available as there were many thousands sold. Easy to upgrade too, depending upon form factor they can be a bit short on expansion potential. Don't bother with the Core2Duo versions though, look for an i3 or i5 variant.

Amazon have some low price offers, my son bought one recently to host CCTV cameras at home. Also take a look at this site. They are ex-lease DELL systems https://www.dellrefurbished.co.uk
 
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cheers for the replies peeps. based on that i upped the budget a bit and went for one of these


A bit better specced that the first choice and it should be fine for Vis Studio. I only need it a couple of days a week when im working somewhere else. Its HP rather than Dell but i dont see why it should be that different.
 
I have recommended quite a few of these Amazon refurbs to folk for decent home PCs.
Most are just big corp tek refreshes so have just sat on the same desk for 3-5 years
swap the old spinning disks for SSD and its a new pc
 
PCs and general components now can last a decade kept in good condition, processors show minute speed improvements year on year.
biggest game change has been SSDs they just turbocharge what used to be the bottleneck.

loads of big PC suppliers are seeing the arse kicked out of their business due to PCs now being used for 5+ years in corp when they used to be turned arround every 3 years.

HMRC have switched almost completely to Microsoft Surface Pros.
 
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This refurb site often has good deals on optiplex and similar computers, with occasionally discount codes here and there.

I upgraded my main computer to an optiplex 9010. Has quad core i7, and a normal 24 pin ATX power socket on the motherboard so I bought a cheap power supply and put in a GTX 1060 (also used). Perfectly suitable for everything I need - gaming, editing, etc.
 
well it came yesterday so spent most of the afternoon installing what i need on it. Its running Visual Studio perfectly well. It was a HP base unit but a dell monitor which was nice, i was expecting some unbranded monitor and it had a set of USB 3 sockets which was nice too, was only expecting 2.0. Only thing i could be critical about was the memory, it had 4 2mb cards filling all the slots up, would of been nicer to have a couple of 4mb ones to leave some room. Its got a 500gb seagate barracuda HD which is perfectly ok for now, there's a spare socket for an SSD and even though its a small form factor box everything unclips and pivots out the way inside which is really nice.

Seriously cant fault it for the price.
 
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That really does look a bargain :)

Out of interest, what are you doing with it in VS?
 
This part of the project is to write a document management system, web APIs based in azure and interfacing to Salesforce and some rotten thing called MFiles
 
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