Here's a question for the PC techies!

I've decided that it's about time to upgrade my PC - I don't want to buy a whole new PC 'cos I have a full tower case with a big PSU, various CD/DVD drives, and other paraphernalia.

So, I was considering an upgrade package from someone like this:

Novatech

I'd probably get one big hard disk to go with this.

Anyone had dealings with this company? Or can suggest a better/more reliable/cheaper alternative?

I'm totally out of touch with what makes up a good piece of kit these days, so any clues would be appreciated!

Oh - BTW - I use my PC for internet access, document writing and occasional picture editing, and rarely (if ever) play games.

cheers,
David

Why do you need to upgrade?

For documents and internet anything around 1Ghz is ample for those tasks.

For picture editing you will need a bit more oomph. Lots of RAM and a decent CPU will speed things up nicely. However it depends on the complexity and amount of editing you do, as to what its worth spending.

If you dont play games, dont bother buying a seperate graphics card, get a motherboard with onboard GPU, its cheaper and will be more than powerful enough.

Even stick with on board sound if you dont use the PC for music/films or games.

I recently built a mate a really good spec machine for about £550 for his video editing business. With a 3.5GHz CPU and 2Gb of RAM, 300Gb HDD etc.

David

The company I work for use Novatech regularly and they have always been very good so I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. The only problems have been with delivery which is down to UPS.

quote:

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Originally posted by flak monkey
Why do you need to upgrade?

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Thats fair enough then

Just didnt want to tell you to get an al singing all dancing machine when what you had would be ok with an upgrade.

The deals on Novatech look pretty good value to me. My original opinions still stand. In a bit more detail:

For occasional light photo editing 2.5GHz and 768Mb RAM is enough.
Occasional more complex editing 3Ghz and 768MB RAM would be ample.
For more frequent use and complex editing go for 3.5Ghz+ and 1.5Gb RAM.

Of course those are my recommendations, but everyone will tell you different.

The place I use for parts (www.eclipsecomputers.com) is in Coventry and are very cheap, but their mail order service is crap to be honest. They are OK in person though!

Other people to check out are eBuyer and Microdirect.

David

Good answer...

I'll have a look at those other options, just for comparison...

cheers,
David

I've used these guys a few times and they have been very good. Prices seem quite competative too.

http://www.autdirect.co.uk

500mg/hz works fine for soho and web until it gets loaded up with anti-virus, printer drivers, modem drivers.

RAM is cheap these days 512mb is really the absolute minium for XP Home with 2Gb the maxiumum the 32 bit version of Xp Home edition can actually make productive use of.


Massive hard disks are best avoided they put out a lot of heat instead go for a decent medium sized ATA133 IDE hardrive (all are these days) with built in cache and make sure you use an 80 conductor cable.

If you don't play many games which need state of the art 3d acceleration and essentially just want browsing and office apps "all in one" motherboards are a good budget upgrade path. My home PCs run dirt cheap ECS K7SOM mother boards and all 3 have been 100% reliable over 2 years+ not bad for 14 quid motherboards :-). I bought the first one because it was the only mb I could find at the time that had the correct form factor to fit in a very tight HP mini tower case.

Forgot an important bit of info... I've currently got 512MB memory at the moment (but it'll soon have to be replaced ) and the system is now/will be running Mandriva Linux, with Win2K available via dual-boot. This is another reason for the upgrade - Mandriva is following Windoze, in becoming bloat-ware...
... I know I could use a less intensive windows manager, but I like the Mandriva functionality.

rgds,
David

Ditch Mandriva, Mandrake always was the slowest Linux --- download a copy of Mepis much more satisfactory version of Linux and much quicker to install.