New computer needed

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ASC1951

Guru
Location
Yorkshire
Get a Macbook Air :thumbsup:
Er - he wants a desktop. And perhaps to do normal stuff on as well ie a Windows machine at half the price. ;)
 
What do you want it to do. I mean, most computers will do for most things that people use nowdays. nearly gone are the days when you needed to really customise it to the activity.

So it comes down to what you want. Whether you want it to run two monitors, have an HDMI output for the tv, be silent, have two hard disks for data backup, have usb3.0 drives or firewire, need to have blu-ray, want to play xbox type games etc etc..

You do a lot of photography don't you? So a good graphics card (that's most now), a good chunk of memory, a card reader slot, that kind of thing is what you want. Think about those kind of details.

Maybe speccing it yourself would be better, at somewhere like this

http://www.chillblast.com/

I'd also really think if you need a desktop. A laptop with a docking port might be more flexible and again, motherboards and processors are changing so fast that the advantage of upgradeability of a desktop is only useful if you intend to actually upgrade it. With sata and usb peripherals are less of a problem than when you had to stick scsi cards in to run scanners and discs.
 

mattobrien

Guru
Location
Sunny Suffolk
Another vote for a mac of some description. My iMac is going very strong and is three and half years old and the mac book air also does whatever I ask of it. I even got at least a grand change out of two grand.

Even the seven year old macbook is still going strong. Yes, I know we have too many computers in our household :whistle:

It's a massive cliche, but macs do work wonderfully well. My brother has recently got a Toshiba laptop running windows 8, it both looks horrible and he has managed to get a lot of adware on it accidentally, it is proving hard to find and remove. Sadly he did not yield to advice and buy a mac, but will next time. Never met an unhappy mac owner, well not with their mac at least ^_^
 

fossyant

Ride It Like You Stole It!
Location
South Manchester
Just spec something up using passive cooling as much as possible. Good hard drive size, as much memory as possible, maybe a Solid State drive for the OS. Half decent graphics.

My main PC is about 8 years old. Still does the job, but it lives in the under stairs cupboard and it's noisy due to the cooling it has. We mainly use tablets for internet, and have a couple of old laptops. The PC has photos and stuff but backed up to a NAS.
 
Location
Northampton
Now you have identified several reasons and all may not be answered by one computer. (Computers are like bikes you know, you need minimum of 3)
OK,
You need one for the bedroom. What do you want to do in the bedroom with the computer? I suppose you want to access internet and e mails. That is what most do with computer in bed room. If that is the case, you may just need a Tablet. You can now buy one for £120.
The other possibility is for you to take your laptop to the bedroom.
Then you can get a one to play chess and other games in away from the bedroom. Would you like that to be something that you can take around, to kitchen, lounge etc. Then you can buy another laptop.
If you are happy with just keeping it in one place, and the monitor or screen is away from you, then you can buy a desktop.
Once you decide on those two, then decide on your budget. Do you have any screens that you can use at home?
 
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