What hard drive / tower

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howy1

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Hi all , I have a monitor , keyboard / mouse I just need to get a brain can you help with this,
I surf the net , do the odd letters , email , print pictures that’s pretty much it .
Could you recommend for me please as I don’t want to go over the top money wise .
Regards
Howy .
 
A tower with an i3 CPU and about 4 to 8GB ram would be fine, you can get a lot cheaper units, but they are quite slow
What did you have before ?
Whats is the budget

I would look at john lewis, as you often get a 2 year warranty

What type of connection is on the Monitor you have , lot of towers have now changed to HDMI and the Monitor, may only be VGA so need to check you have the correct connections

£449
https://www.johnlewis.com/lenovo-id...V24BQBh02QgFCEAQYASABEgI3F_D_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Has VGA & HDMI output for graphics

Most towers also come with a mouse & keyboard
 
Hi, i've just taken a second-hand PC from Ebay with an i3-3100 and 4Gb of RAM, installed Linux Mint and it's as fast as the i3 8th gen i'm typing this on. If you want to go second-hand route, i can help look through a few ads if you like? The machine i bought was 7 miles away, so picked it up whilst doing my weekly shop. Cheers
 
Thanks chalky , I have looked locally for 2nd hand , but decided to go new around £300 - £400
Would you have any ideas regarding this .
Howy
 
I don't know whether you are able to do this but if you can replace that 1Tb HDD with a smallish SSD. Use the 1Tb in a caddy as an external storgae drive for your photos and backups. You can clone the stuff on the 1Tb disk to the SSD using free software such as Macrium Reflect. As I say I don't know whether you are able to do this stuff but if you can an SSD will speed things up dramatically.
 
yeah, best use a tiny SSD for operating system, and then a second SATA HDD for storage perhaps, replicating to a USB external HDD through something like Microsoft's free SyncToy app.
Like Eta said, go with a cheap desktop unit from JL or Currys, you could go cheaper than Eta's suggestion, all new units would typically suit howy's needs, and it comes with Win10 too. Whack LibreOffice or OpenOffice ontop for free word processor, spreadsheet etc.
https://www.johnlewis.com/lenovo-id...-a9-processor-8gb-ram-1tb-hdd-silver/p4855882
 
Personally I would not buy that £449 system, the CPU is overkill and it doesn't even have an SSD meaning everyday use performance within Windows will be painfully slow. Seems overpriced to me.

The £319 system above would be alright if an SSD was added but the processor isn't the best and you'll have no future upgrade options as it appears to be a soldered-on item.

My recommendation is this at £340, for the reasons below: https://www.ebuyer.com/901427-punch...-ssd-amd-r7-win10-pro-desktop-pc-pdt-702-1022

- It's ready to use out of the box with a fast modern dual core socket'd (up-gradable) CPU, plenty of RAM (8GB), a 240GB SSD which should be plenty of space for what you want but adding an extra hard drive to this system should be very easy if you needed to as it'll use a standard power supply and mATX board. It has windows 10 Professional which gives you a bit more control over updates, it has a 3yr warranty, the built in graphics are half decent if you or anyone that uses it wanted to play some basic games, and did I mention it's a standard case so will be easy to work on and upgrade in the future should you want to?

-or-

If you can install & obtain a licence for Windows 10 yourself, this at £210 appears to be the same as above but in a different case and without an operating system installed (or licence): https://www.ebuyer.com/862960-punch-technology-amd-desktop-pc-ldt-703-1037
 
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Morgan Computers are way overpriced imo. They want £100 for a core2duo system that will be around 10-12 years old & would struggle even with the basics & YouTube will be restricted to about 360p!

Anything half decent from there is £250+, may as well put a few quid more toward and get what I linked to previously or even save money if they have a Windows 10 licence.
 
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