help me choose a new home pc PLEASE

[painfullyhonest]

Our home pc is very elderly, about 4 or 5 years old.... it is sooooo slow and very annoying.

We have a shiny new monitor and broadband with sky.

Can you recommend a good site for buying home pcs? I am looking for a company with good aftercare service so they can help me set up the new pc, hopefully, and transfer stuff from old to new.

Am a bit confused as to what we need - DH accesses his work email remotely quite a bit and uses excel A LOT (remotely again) so I'm looking for a machine that can handle this well, plus having itunes on it with about 20gb of stuff on it. Otherwise it will be used mostly for internet browsing. A brand recommendation would be a start! I have an acer laptop that I love, but do they make good desktops?

Last time I bought a laptop I asked about whether a laptop could handle the remote working and the guy at johnlewis said no. Has that changed? Wd we be better off with a laptop now? I would prefer to have a desktop really.

Any new desktop will be able to handle all your requirement above.

So really, its down to how much you want to spend.

I recommend a desktop from here:

www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/home/deals5/fs.aspx?refid=deals5&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1

That way you can keep your shiny monitor and just pay for the base unit.

You can also talk to dell online if you are unsure about any component in the deal.

I routinely look at Dell's 'TV deals' to see what devices they are promoting that week, in case some special deal is better than any that I was aware of.

Stick to dell or HP.

You can probably get a cheaper one but in my experience they are quieter than unbranded ones.

I learned years ago that it's worth sacrificing a bit of horsepower and even spending a few quid more for tranquility rather than have a helicopter under the desk,

Yes, would vouch for quiet over grunt.

Some of the best (quietest) machines I have come across were the Windows XP Media Centre systems - significantly quieter.

Would also consider some of the Acer Revo systems at 200-350 pounds (eg from Play.com, Ebuyer.com, and similar) as many of those are small enough to fit to the back of a decent (17") LCD and designed to be fairly quiet to be able to run as video players [HDMI output for TVs as well as VGA for normal monitor].

As for the chap at John Lewis - sorry, seems he was probably out of touch - without knowing exactly what your DH uses, there's no good reason for him to suggest it isn't possible.

There are differences between different versions of some operating systems, but whether your DH can connect depends on firewalls, and what mechanism or software he uses.

If (for example) it was Mac specific software, you'd need a Mac, but without knowing more it would be awkward to say yes or no to such a question, and the JL chap should have thought longer rather than say 'no' as a knee-jerk reaction.

tks for yr posts.
I'm still confused about my DH's needs for the PC so will have to call someone about this.

Will a faster processor help the computer to cope with DH signing in remotely to his work network? I understand that Intel has new processors but I'm not sure who they are most useful/effective for.

Buy an inspiron desktop from the Dell website.

intel iCore processor, Windows 7 home premium, 3gb ram, 300gb HD (pretty standard). Should be about £400 ish, you don't need a screen, this will be more than adequate for VPN.

Is your PC connected directly to your sky router via cable?

If it helps I work remotely on my laptop which is an HP,very pleased with it.However have HP touchsmart family desktop pc and it has been a disaster,slow,useless wireless and we have just had our second total system failure in 12 months

Will a faster processor help the computer to cope with DH signing in remotely to his work network?