[Henry]

My father's got a very old pc which is really horrendously slow and I was thinking of seeing if I could get him a cheap pc for his birthday/christmas.

He's got mouse, keyboard, screen, printer, webcam etc etc. The only thing he needs is the box itself.

Anyone with any ideas as to where would be a good place to try and get one cheaply?

I think Novatech do some okay basic PCs.

[Big Adam]

For anyone needing a basic PC for simple office applications and copious surfing, I would always recommend a cheap (i.e. sub 300 quid) Dell.

Rock solid build quality and decent support.

[GaryB]

If the keyboard and monitor are very old, you may have compatibility problems, i.e. old keyboards tend to have DIN rather than PS2 or USB connections and the monitor may not be able to display any decent resolutions. Best to go for a cheap complete system. The cheap Dells as recommended by Big Adam are as good as most at the price. Also look at Mesh.

[Miyazaki]

I personally wouldn't recommend dell. Who wants refurbished parts in a new computer? They are also notoriously un-upgradable due to the parts they use as well.

I would recommend going somewhere like cclonline.com or scan.co.uk and specifying your own pc.

Something like this would probably be ideal http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...ufacturer_id=0

[GaryB]

Originally Posted by Games Guru

I personally wouldn't recommend dell. Who wants refurbished parts in a new computer? They are also notoriously un-upgradable due to the parts they use as well.

At least you know they've been tested

All the Dells I've ever opened used bog standard parts.

[Nick_UK]

Dell's are cheap because they sell direct. Never seen any quality problems with them, but you don't have the luxury of a showroom to browse in (if that's important to you).

Trouble with Dell? Everyone I know who has one says the Customer Service sucks. But they all agree that the essential package is otherwise great.

[jenic]

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=95738

great price and it includes windows, there is a cheaper one on the site but it is linux and is much lower spec.

Not that there is anything wrong with linux, just it might be easier to use windows.

[unique]

you can get a dell from the home office section for £175 - dimension 1000 - use code 305 - D11111 and choose the option on the warranty to deduct £80 from the original price. click the optional optical mouse option (free) and you have a half decent basic spec pc with 80 gig HD and 48x cdrom, 512mb ram, with keyboard and mouse and xp. add monitor and your up and running. its more than sufficient for most office apps, just not very suitable for gaming or lots of video editing, but if your dad is surviving with a crappy old pc, then i'm sure that dell will be more than sufficient for his needs.

for upgrading, it's probably cheaper to buy elsewhere than use the dell upgrade options. you can get a dvd writer for £30 from svp or dabs etc if required

[JohnG]

A lot of people would be happy with a cheap computer as they are just not interested in upgrading them and will use them until they need to buy another Just make sure that he doesn't get an XP computer with the basic 256MB of RAM as in my experience that is not enough. At least 512MB is required for running XP IMHO.
I always wonder about the supposed upgradeability of any computer you buy pre-built as if anything goes wrong with it and you have been inside it to upgrade something (or even just to insert a PCI card) I imagine that most of the manufacturers will say that the warranty would be void.

[Knyght_byte]

Dell only void the warranty if you use things Dell dont sell......so if you buy the memory from dell and fit it yourself then your warranty should still be valid...if you buy it from somewhere else (even if its teh same memory) then it wont be valid....

personally i cant say anything bad against Dell....have had 4 PC's from them, two of them still running good and well, the first got struck by lightening (and check this, the HDD actually remained intact! just everything else in the box got fried..lol), the second was the insurance replacement, which only went down because i overloaded the PSU by putting in too many things (was still learning about computers at the time..lol) such as an extra HDD, CD-RW, much more powerful graphics card, sound card, doubled the memory...plugged in a bunch of USB stuff...lol..poor thing lasted a while then went phut one day....heh....

any cheap PC you buy will be difficult to upgrade as most cheap PC's use boards with built in graphics and sound, so they have no AGP or PCI-Ex16 slots to upgrade with, only normal PCI slots which nowadays rules out graphics upgrades....the memory slots are normally all being used when you buy, so unless it supports larger MB memory modules you cant upgrade, the CPU could probably be changed, but even then, as with Dell and their motherboards, you might find that difficult or not worth the risk....
also the PSU's are usually pretty poor.......
so buy wherever you get the best deal if your looking at a few hundreds worth, but Dell will probably last longer and be more durable......and hey, people moan about Dells customer service (which the one time i used i found no problems with), so how many people do you see moaning about Dixons/PC World type shops after sales service when the puter breaks down? (unless of course you took out the super duper top flight extended warranty that cost as much as the computer...heh)...a hell of a lot more people moan about their service!.........its only when you spend much more and go to companies that produce specialist rigs like Alienware etc that you find they might be a good alternative to a Dell.....(altho personally my 8400 is a damn fine machine from Dell and was happily the equivelant of an Alienware that cost the same and didnt even come with the monitor that a friend of mine had...in fact i did one better, my 6800GTO graphics card overclocks to 6800 Ultra level.....his 6800GT kept on failing over 400/1050)