My Dad is wanting to upgrade from his prehistoric lump in his study.

He's wanting a faster computer for working on. Would only need decent stereo sound, nothing that a better motherboard couldn't offer and onboard graphics will do the job fine.

It would seem to make sense to buy motherboard/RAM/cpu that is all future proofed, will also need to pick up a copy of windows for it. 120/160 GB hard drive off ebay would do the trick. What's the best way to approach this, I've never built a PC before and it would be nice to learn, then again it may be cheaper to buy a package one (dare I say it a Dell).

Only thing it's likely to have added to it is a PCI network adapter so maybe a small form cube could be the way to go as compactness is an issue.

Any suggestions as to what would be best, would also need a smallish (but good quality) TFT monitor.

The other thing I thought about was dual booting a Mac Mini, they're so small and the ones I've used at school have been easily as fast as my PC (which is rather depressing really ).

Most (if not all) modern motherboards have intergrated 100 or 1000BaseT NICs.

Dell do sell whole PCs at very competitive prices, building your own PC is now more for the enthusiast who wants specific parts and the fun of building it himself.

For a work PC any modern CPU should be fine, motherboard wise future-proof does make sense (I know the lastest AMD socket is designed to accept future processors, don't know about the Intel line). Don't be stingy on memory, quantity is useful.

It's difficult to give more advice without more specific as to what the PC will be running and what budget you need to work to. Or how small the case needs to be. A microATX form factor case and board will probably be of interest to you.

Quote from Bob Smith :

It's difficult to give more advice without more specific as to what the PC will be running and what budget you need to work to.

The PC will be running mainly office, music, web browsing and maybe light photo work, that will be about it TBH. I have no intention of putting Vista on it atm but think that given the ridiculously high entry requirements to get the same performance on Vista there's no point in being too stingy with it.

Budgets as low as it can be TBH, could stretch to about £550 for a decent future proof computer with monitor.

If it's for work purposes, you're probably better off buying one to be honest, and taking an on-site support package along with it.
Don't know about other companies, but Dell's Business Support is next day, some others are the same, but some are Return to Base.

A Core2Duo machine with a couple of Gig of Ram should be more than good enough to run most work related software for the next 3-4 years. By which time you'd be thinking of replacing it anyway.

Quote from need :

If it's for work purposes, you're probably better off buying one to be honest, and taking an on-site support package along with it.
Don't know about other companies, but Dell's Business Support is next day, some others are the same, but some are Return to Base.

It's not his main work computer, just another one that he can use whilst the other ones are in use to browse the net/word processing/e-mails etc. So really next day support is a complete waste of money seeing as the only computer I've ever had a failure on was 7 years old and completely obsolete and unused. There are plenty of alternative PCs that he could use to do this stuff if he had a problem on his one.

EDIT - the cheapest Dell works out at £450 with the Intel dual core and 1 GB of RAM, shame it's only available with Vista though

Is there a big difference between the Dell Value and Ultrasharp monitors?

Why not use linux? it'll be much cheaper and will do all of the things you said.

Quote from ZORER :

Why not use linux? it'll be much cheaper and will do all of the things you said.

My Dad isn't going to be interested in learning his way round Linux.

For a work computer for those that you listed? Sheesh, any computer that is available now is fine for that. Heck, I'm forced to do it all on a Celeron 1.2, onboard sound, and onboard 2D only graphics. Surfs the web just fine. Any post you see from me in the US mornings/afternoons during the week is done on the work computer. I do email, surf, wordprocessing and Rockwell software automation programming/running on the little ole Celeron.

Try this site http://www.overclockers.co.uk/

This one should last for a couple of years (no monitor)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... duct.php?prodid=FS-026-OK

Monitor for the one above ^^^^
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... duct.php?prodid=MO-015-BQ