Gauging One's Needs

[BarkingGhostar]

Ok, the wife wants a new at-home work PC that will not have her waiting on opening, saving, and closing Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel), etc.). Same goes for Outlook, too.

I'm use to making more upper-line PCs and not something more reserved. So, I thought that compared to what she is running Office on now (original P4 2.4GHz w/1GB), anything out there including 2-core Celerons w/2-4GB would be sufficient.

Then I got to thinking that she will want to use Adobe Photoshop Extended (CS5) on her at home personal PC. That unit is an E4500 w/2GB. I might convert the at-home personal to an at-home work PC, and just build her a better box for the CS5 inclusive effort.

But, reading the minimum system requirements for CS5 seems rather lower than what I imagined would be the case. I was thinking of something like a Q82-Q700 (quad core), or an i3 530 w/6GB.

If this were not an app-specific endeavor I'd be looking at the i5 and Q9xxx, but not entirely sure why one would go 'i' vs 'Q' in the first place.

 

[thedosbox]

If this were not an app-specific endeavor I'd be looking at the i5 and Q9xxx, but not entirely sure why one would go 'i' vs 'Q' in the first place.

The Q series are all socket 775, effectively a dead platform. Although a quad-core CPU replacement would be an easy upgrade, it would have little benefit in Office applications.

What sort of budget are you looking at? If cash isn't a problem, using a SSD as the boot drive would help with load times. Depending on how old the current hard drive is, a newer one might improve file opening times.

An extra 2GB of memory would help with Photoshop if she works with large data sets.