New computer

[Bahco]

My 4 yr old Dell is playing up a bit and I fancy a new desktop. Have a budget of £300 to £400 and would like recomendations please.

Only use it for browsing the net and uploading photos as well as the odd word doc so would a tablet be of any use?

Dell has been ok but what other makes are out there that are worth looking at.

Thanks

 

[ellal]

Only use it for browsing the net and uploading photos as well as the odd word doc so would a tablet be of any use?

 

[Spark123]

This has a fairly good spec for price if you don't mind it being red:
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hp-pavilion-g6-2244sa-15-6-laptop-ruby-red-17419992-pdt.html
I have a tablet PC but only use it for viewing email, typing anything of any length on a tablet screen isn't nice but you could get a keyboard of course.

 

[securespark]

We went through a lot of reviews trying to pick a decent machine for our price point.

Mrs S wanted to replace her ancienne Dell Optiplex GX50 with a laptop.

Resident computer guru Monkeh, ever helpful, steered us towards an i3 Lenovo machine:

//www.diynot.com/forums/hardware/choosing-new-laptop.317835/page-6#2498498

As far as a tablet is concerned, the Nexus is brill, or if your budget is a bit bigger, the Samsung Tabs.

The Lenovo has been a good machine, no worries so far.

 

[chapeau]

My 4 yr old Dell is playing up a bit and I fancy a new desktop. Have a budget of £300 to £400 and would like recomendations please.

Only use it for browsing the net and uploading photos as well as the odd word doc so would a tablet be of any use?

Dell has been ok but what other makes are out there that are worth looking at.

Thanks

Id be tempted to see if it fixable. almost certainly got loads of rubbish on it which is slowing it down. back up your important stuff and reinstall everything again. dells often have a partition on hard drive to do this for you. Google is your friend and put the money you might save to better use over Christmas

 

[Brigadier]

Bahco,

I bought one from Big Pockets, like

http://www.bigpockets.co.uk/product.php?title=Bigpockets-Best-Value-AMD-2.7Ghz-PC&product=RGOFF005

Add Ubuntu as an OS (for free!), and it is rapid (12s start up, 3s shut down), and pretty much immune to viruses.

 

[AronSearle]

If all you use it for is the net/photos/word documents.

Just get another dell.

 

[securespark]

Just got this recommendation from ebuyer:

http://www.ebuyer.com/407538-zoosto...2012&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b2c_monday

 

[conny]

Thats just for the motherboard/ram. It doesn't include a monitor, (poss use existing one) and doesn't have an OS installed so you would have to buy Windows 7/8 or whatever OS you wanted to use. Unless youare using peripherals off your dell then you are looking at new keyboard/mouse etc as well.

 

[securespark]

Granted, but I think it's still a good price.

The other one featured also had no monitor, KB or mouse etc..

 

[conny]

Just wasn't sure if you had spotted that so thought best to point it out mate.

 

[securespark]

Gotcha. Sorry. Yes, I had. It was posted as a contender to the other one that also was a tower only deal.

 

[HH1]

I think chapeau has hit it right on the money.

Unless your looking for an excuse for a change of machine.

Would be tempted to reformat and reinstall OS and applications if they were available.
As was said there should be a recovery partition on the hard drive with the OS (and drivers?)sitting there for reinstallation. Dell manuals/support or google should be able to come up with the instructions.

Another possibility I would say is worth looking at is the fitting a solid state drive as the main drive.
Is it SATA that's on 4 year old Dells?
Fitted one to an old Advent 7203 laptop along with downgraded OS and it gave it a totally new lease of life. Granted this was fresh install, everything cleaned out and vista to xp downgrade but for what was about to be replaced, to something that is still going strong, I was more than happy with the decision.
It's advice to anyone who is considering junking their machine.
And yes they can be fitted to desktops just in case anyone asks.

 

[AronSearle]

Never reformat and reinstall the OS, you should never need to unless you have a virus you really really can't kill (0.1% chance), it's a myth that it will improve performance any more than a competent tidy up will.

This is written assuming a basic user

1. download and install Ccleaner, easy to run and use will clean up a lot of crap. http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
2. you don't need to buy any virus checkers etc. Only companies should pay for these
3. download and install/run malwarebytes http://www.malwarebytes.org/
4. AVG anti virus is decent and free, let it do a system scan if you don't have a virus checker already.
5. run a disc defrag, probably best to leave it going overnight.


Don't clear your temp folder regularly (once a year is enough), having stuff in it doesn't slow down your computer as lot's of people will tell you, it will either sit there doing nothing or slightly increase speed as it doesn't need to download or decompress the data again.

 

[kjacko]

HH1 and Chapeau's suggestions are the cheapest fixes first kind of ideas, which i think are worth trying.
An SSD will make a significant different to performance on your pc. You can pick up a sata2 drive for peanuts now as your Dell will definitely NOT have sata3 ports so no need for the faster drives if you want to save money.

That said a Samsung 830 256gb will cost around £140.

If it were me, i'd:
backup my data
reformat back to factory settings
install some cloning software (Acronis True Image etc)
Clone the image onto a new SSD mounted externally
Switch pc off, replace hdd with ssd
boot up with new improved performance
use old hdd as storage only (rename windows folder to 'windows.old' so it doesn't try booting from it)

That is what i do to an older flagging pc in need of revitalising.