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Well since its not going to be editing anything major you dont need to worry too much about the specification then.

I wouldnt pay any more than £400 for that PC - any more any you're bieng ripped off.

The celeron D's are truly awful processors, I swear theyre not actually any faster than the old pentium 3 based ones they replaced. With vista around the corner you might want to consider getting a slightly faster machine with a low-end graphics card so you dont have to replace it in a year or so time.

Whats your budget?

Well you may have noticed that Ive been posting on this thread for a while now about a new PC, but I'm going to uni (hopefully) in the next academic year, so I'll have to sort out a new PC mid-late July.

I'd originally planned a skt 939 system, but I got all flustered about future-proofing and saw that the price of skt AM2 mobo, processor and RAM was actually a tenner cheaper.

Here's the original system I'd planned;

Motherboard Gigabyte K8N SLI nForce4
Processor AMD Athlon64 3500 Venice Retail Socket 939
RAM Corsair Value Select 2x512MB PC3200
Gfx Card DabsValue GF 7600GS 256MB DDR2 PCI-E DVI
HDD Samsung 160GB S300 7200RPM 8MB
DVD RW LG Electronics Super Multi DVD+-R/RW/RAM Dual Layer 16x IDE OEM
DVD ROM Samsung 16x DVD-ROM Beige
Case Casecom KB-7760 Black ATX Midi Tower Case - No PSU, No Case Fans Included
PSU Thermaltake PurePower TWV 430W ATX2.0 PSU (W0053) (CA-023-TT)

That comes to £388 inc VAT

However, i thought about buying the following AM2 stuff for £10 less than the 939 equivalent;

Mobo MSI K9N NEO-F nF550 Socket AM2
Processor AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Retail AM2
RAM Corsair Memory 512MB 240pin DIMM non-ECC unbuffered CL5 667MHz

*edit* whilst your at it, does anyone know how the hell I can search Google for mobo reviews without billions of results offering to compare the cheapest bloody price for them?

Avoid Casecom - horribly cheap plasticy stuff, and the side panels are thin as paper.

Thermaltake are not a good power supply manufacturer - shell out that tenner more for a Seasonic, you wont regret it.

As for AM2, you're getting a lower-grade motherboard and less ram...

When will you next upgrade?

It'd probably perform about the same if you have one of the P3 based ones, they were resonably 'fast' (relativly).

Your laptop shouldnt cost too much to fix. Hell, you could do it yourself for £40 (depending on how big of a disk you want) - putting a new hard disk in and installing windows XP is a very simple task.

If youre on a budget, see if you can find a high-end Sempron or low-end AMD64 based machine. Both will be faster than a celeron at the same price point.

and when did WXGA (1280x800 iirc) become HD?

Thats a scam making it sound like its HDTV capable, which it isnt - the resolution is too low and the grpahics chip would stand a chance.

some idiot at fujitsu siemens decided that the xp disc should corresspond to the hard drive so the current hard drive which COULD be salvagable cant get xp on it... which then makes me think will getting a new hard drive make any difference really since the whole machine seems to like its original parts farrrrr too much!

and you havent said whether it would be faster or not?! I have a celeron... i persume its the first celeron as it has no letters after it... would it be faster than that?!

and when did WXGA (1280x800 iirc) become HD?

Thats a scam making it sound like its HDTV capable, which it isnt - the resolution is too low and the grpahics chip would stand a chance.

Take it to an independant retailer, or if you know any computing science students they'd do it cheaply enough.



The 'celeron' brand started as failed versions of some of the P2's then leter on they became based on the P3 cores.

I'd assume the fact that its clocked so highly would bail it out a bit, but the Celeron D's were truly awful processors. It's likely to be faster than an older one, but not by as much as the clockspeed would make you think.