I disagree. Your choices are based on what you actually want to do with it. If like me the OP essentially wants a machine to do browsing, word processing, a limited amount of photo editing, music storage and the like, then, eg, 2 TB of storage is almost certainly massive overkill. I sort out my FiL's PC whenever we go to visit - update scanning software, defragment, all that sort of stuff - and after maybe five or six years, he still has something like 210Mb of free space on his 250Mb HD.
A bit of context. A quick check suggests I've got 51GB of music and 38GB of photos thus far. I'm currently in the process of editing my photos from earlier this week: twelve done, another eighty-two to go... And that's having deleted over a hundred that I didn't like or were duplicates. I rarely come back from a walk with less than a hundred.
Good. So that's one place to start. You need quite a lot of storage capacity. How much, and what else? What else do you need for what you want to do?
since upgrading to an SSD that noisy fan never seems to kick in to life... maybe it simply doesn't work, or maybe it doesn't need to work... either way, it's not noisy like the old desktops were
This is where you'll need the memory and processing power then. Still not much by gaming standards but once you start using layers you'll eat memory and processing. Most modern pc's will still cope admirably though.
Free alternatives exist - Gimp IIRC
Isn't gimp a linux thing? I've used something called photofiltre for years - does everything I want to, and a lot more than I'll ever understand, and it's a free download. You have to make sure you get the English version - I think it's French originally.
