Im starting my first year at university and rather than spend time forgiving my slow laptop for not even being able to run the simplist of things efficiantly ive decided to get a budget desktop pc, and turn to your collective and infinate wisdoms for aid. The problem that i have is the number of options available, being a novice i cant seperate what is effective within the many price ranges and what upgrades to take. I am ideally looking for a complete ready to go package for around the £400-500 including vat mark although this could be slightly streched and am hoping to get one at 0% finance with the idea of paying it off after 9-12 months, again i am unknowing as to which companies will offer this to a student. Its a case of trying to find an all round ok system for the best money, any advice would be magic and will help this student a great deal. If you want to e-mail me some advice that would be excellent also.
im at mullin797@yahoo.com. THANKS

For that kind of price you should be able to get a very capable PC.

First you need to decide if you want a thin TFT LCD monitor or a normal CRT monitor. LCD is obviously more expensive so will limit what you can spend on the rest.

Next you need to decide if you want to play the latest games? You can buy £1500 PCs that can't play games (cos they don't have a decent graphics card) -- but a £250 PC with a £100 graphics card added will do them just fine! Think of the graphics card like a game console -- actually they cost about the same price so maybe just get an Xbox instead?

Get a DVD-/+RW drive if you can.

Get at least 512MB RAM (pay for more RAM rather than a faster processor!!).

Then get the best processor and hard disk that you've got money left for, they're not so important overall.

Thanks a lot buddy i think im gonna get a pc bundle for around the £600 mark it saves a lot of time something that is always a bonus to a first year student. Thanks for the advice on the RAM issue i will consider this when buying.

ThAnKsSsSsSsSsSsSsS \_/ . matt