New PC Spec

Paul Holtom

Paul Holtom

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My current PC is starting to play up, does not always boot up so think the hard drive is on the way out so have backed everything up and have started to think about a new machine. So with this in mind what spec would people recommend, I am not wanting to spend more that £600.00 on the base unit (already have monitor, keyboard etc.) Guess its as much processor and RAM as I can get, but what about graphics cards and hard drives.
 
Paul Holtom said:
My current PC is starting to play up, does not always boot up so think the hard drive is on the way out so have backed everything up and have started to think about a new machine. So with this in mind what spec would people recommend, I am not wanting to spend more that £600.00 on the base unit (already have monitor, keyboard etc.) Guess its as much processor and RAM as I can get, but what about graphics cards and hard drives.
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What are you using the machine for? Is it just photography/office type apps?

Are there any parts which can be saved? ie case, dvd writer, memory card readers etc.

Are you up to building the machine?

£600 will buy the parts for a pretty useful machine.

Case £40
Hard drive 2 x 500Gb £120 (One drive for Windoze and one for data)
DVD writer £20
CPU (quad core 2.4 OR dual core 3.0) £160
Motherboard £70 (with on board sound, Gb network)
4 x 1Gb 800MHz DDR2 £50 (or £70 for 4Gb as 2x2 leaving 2 spare slots)
Graphics card £140

This would be a decent machine for the money.....
 
Pretty irrespective of what you want it for go for an Intel CoreDuo (or Quad) they are pretty much the best at the moment.

2-4Gigs of RAM is a good bet

Graphics card will depend on what you want to do. If you are not a gamer then a £70 version will do all you want. Up that to £150+ if you are.

Get 2 hard drives. DONT get RAID0 (zero). It is faster, but your data is on both drives. Lose one drive you lose the lot. (Raid 1 on the other hand is the exact opposite, one is a copy of the other so you lose 50% total storage for a VASTLY increased level of data security)

Sound card... unless you are a musician or out and out gamer then the motherboard sound capability will do for you

HTH
 
Looks like me and oldgit pretty much agree on the spec. If you are up to building it you will save because you can pick the bits that YOU want rather than a machine averaged out to fit in your price range. Like oldgit said you could save money on the graphics card by maybe spending a little less on that. Someone like Scan (www.scan.co.uk) or aria tech (www.aria.co.uk will supply all the parts to fit in the budget I gave then if you reduce the graphics card to one costing maybe £100 the saving will cover the building cost!

If you really want a pre built computer try DELL but you really do get the best putting it together yourself. The above machine would take me an hour to put together and be installing windoze! Hey, if you live round here i'll put it together for you!
 
Paul Holtom said:
Thanks for the offer of building it Cowasaki but Milton Keynes to Preston bit far me thinks. Will have a good look at specs on the web and then make decision, do have laptop if the hard drive gives out.
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If you have a laptop then I would replace the 2nd hard drive with a FIREWIRE external drive which will maybe cost you an extra £20 or a dual interface one for maybe £30 extra

If your laptop does not have firewire then you will need to either buy a firewire interface or use USB2 for that.

(although USB2 is SUPPOSED to be quicker than firewire it ISNT it is about half)
 
600 quid buys a lot these days if it's just a base unit you want. Hardly worth the hassle of building yourself any more.
 
Before going to the expense of a new PC, have you thought about a clean install of the OS and programs onto your existing machine? So long as your data is backed up and/or kept on a separate partition from the OS (that's how I do it), you may as well at least try a clean install first of all.

As for the new PC side of things, I bought a Dell XPS 420 base unit for just under £600 in January. Specs include....

Intel 2.4GHz quad core processor
3GB RAM
2 * 500GB HDD (non raid)
nVidia 8800GT graphics (way over the top for photography)
Built in flash card reader
Oodles of USB ports
Firewire port(s?)
Vista Home Premium 32 bit.

It runs nice and quiet and has been without problems since delivery on 11th Jan (once I got the latest drivers installed in the beginning). Here's the system stability report for the last month....

2304441136_74a2e95634_o.jpg
 
Paul Holtom said:
One final question before a purchase is made, which processor is best for just photo editing, dual core 3.0GHz or quad core 2.4GHz.
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not sure of the exact speed differences - here's a comparison with CS3 http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2963&p=7

seems quad core does have an advantage over dual core in CS3 at least.

but you can overclock a Q6600 to 3GHz very easily i would have thought. This is why I think if you have £600 to spend you're better off building or buying something with a decent motherboard that can overclock easily. For cheaper, dells are hard to beat though.
 
Dual Core can sometimes be faster than Quad it depends on the whole system rather than the processor. I'm also looking for a new PC and have specced a very nice one for just under £400 barebones with just the HDD's and Windows to install. That's starting with 2GB of RAM. Don;t forget if you go the Vista route i'd recommend a dedicated 256MB graphics card. All that fancy stuff eats system memory which is shared unless you have a dedicated card. Unless you're a gamer you'll pick up something reasonable for under £40.

You'll also be amazed what a proper clean up and registry clean can do to a computer. Don;t do this though unless you know what you are doing or it will end in tears.
 
You'll also be amazed what a proper clean up and registry clean can do to a computer. Don;t do this though unless you know what you are doing or it will end in tears.[/QUOTE]

So, as I can't do this, is it something any small computer repair shop can do with ease ?
I am in a fairly remote area in southern Spain, so am limited by distance as to places to go to, so any hints as to what to do before ?
 
steveinspain said:
So, as I can't do this, is it something any small computer repair shop can do with ease ?
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Maybe, maybe not. It depends whether they're just selling or whether they have some actual knowledge about Windows and Windows registry.
 
I support five machines on my home network. Every few months I will likely rebuild my main machine because over the months I have installed and removed too much crap and it's all gone a bit messy and slow. I either start with a clean install and go from there or simply reinstate a clean image copy that I took shortly after the previous build and that saves a whole bunch of time. In my experience, registry cleaning is a short term solution that may cause problems and will result in a rebuild at some point anyway.

The important thing is to secure your data before mucking about. I keep my data on a separate partition, and backed up to a portable HDD and a separate PC so I'm watertight. I can reinstall my OS till the cows come home and my data will remain safe. If your data is all mixed into the same partition as your OS you could have a bit of a pain separating it out and securing it.

If you want to pay someone to sort you out it could easily cost a large chunk of the budget - maybe £100 or something - you could have put towards the new machine anyway.
 
There are loads of registry cleaning tools on the web, I use regseeker seems to find registry rubbish quite often
 
I also use JV16 and CCleaner, but ultimately I end up going back to a clean build after a while.
 
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