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Need to buy a Cheap PC for my Dad.

C

Coldkilla

Diamond Member
I'm always updating my PC, so I'm having a hard time trying to find out how "low you can go" when it comes to purchasing a desktop at a very low price while keeping efficiency up for simple tasks.

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Long Story Short: We need a new, cheap PC that can run as an every-day work and home PC. Something that can run multiple programs at once without showing signs of slow down.. Like running Windows Media Player while browsing 10 websites and having MSOffice 2007 on in the backround (and maybe a little extra). Burning DVDs/CDs is also a requirement as my Dad is a band director and distributes DVDs/CDs to his band-mates weekly.
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My Dad's PC is over 9 years old and he thinks even $500 for a new PC is steep. He has a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc already so he doesn't need any extra stuff save the actual Tower. I've been looking into these Optiplex Dell Systems, but am unsure how "cheap" I can go before we start running into system slowdowns when running specific software programs.

I'm basically trying to get that number as low as possible so he will at least consider getting a new PC. He is almost convinced that the reason his 9 year old PC is slow because of a virus...a virus, and not because its 9 YEARS old! lol. He's going to be going to the local store soon and having it wiped clean (again!) for $200 in hopes that it will make it faster heh. I've already formatted it and got it back up nice and new... yet he says (dumbly) there still must be a virus still on there from what I installed (a fresh legal copy of XP apparently is filled with Viruses). His paranoia is going to make me go nuts unless I have another solution for him.

I was looking at the OptiPlex 755 (Ultra Small Form Factor), but that $468 price tag might be a little too high to recommend because he'll probably just shut me out and go pay the outrages $200 for something that won't help him.

Once the prices on the PC's on Dells site start to go below $460, the processors switch to AMD's and I have no real experience with them so I cant tell whats decent. I know 1GB of Ram is at least something he'll need. His job relies on him and his PC and he'll need that extra memory. Anyways, sorry for the long winded post - any suggestions are extremely appreciated.
 
A cheap Dell Vostro minitower? Any dual core should work great, just get 2 GB for Vista. You can put in a $50 graphics card to free up a little memory and make screen refreshes snappier.
 
These look pretty good.

I should note that even though I know my way around a PC, my Dad still prefers to leave maintenance and repairs up to other people. He may agree to the individual parts warrenty if I try and describe to him how it works.
 
Not sure why you're looking at the Optis. You can get an Inspiron 530 for as low as $369 + tax/shipping, and it's not AMD. E5400, 3 gigs, 320G drive, DVD-R/W, speakers, kb/mouse, and Vista Premium. It should fit well within that $450 ceiling, and is more than he needs.

Nine years...that's the period when the Coppermine was king. But I'm going to assume he has a Katmai. NT5.x was developed and tested around those series of procs, and I've run XP on a Katmai 600 with 768 megs...it was no slouch.

yet he says (dumbly) there still must be a virus still on there from what I installed (a fresh legal copy of XP apparently is filled with Viruses)
Click to expand...

If it was XP Gold, his system was compromised within 4 minutes of connecting to the Internet. He may not be that dumb...
 
is he cheap..or is he poor.
if he's just cheap you can put pressure on him to get himself something nicer. lifes too short to use a old monitor for instance. and old people appreciate big screens+better for eyes. a nice 24" screen would be sweet. rest would simply be bog standard dell dual core, can't go wrong iwth that.
 
Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
is he cheap..or is he poor.
if he's just cheap you can put pressure on him to get himself something nicer. lifes too short to use a old monitor for instance. and old people appreciate big screens+better for eyes. a nice 24" screen would be sweet. rest would simply be bog standard dell dual core, can't go wrong iwth that.
Click to expand...

+1

The standard build on an Inspiron 530 now includes an E5300 Proc (2.6GHz), Vista Home premium, 3 GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive, and no monitor for 380 bucks.

http://configure.us.dell.com/d...s~desktops_great_deals

I've seen decent deals on graphics cards lately, so you'd be surprised what you can get for under a hundred bucks. Check around.

The monitor is key though. That's what he has to look at whenever he uses it, so if you skimp out on that, his computing experience will be less than stellar.

You could get a 24 inch monitor for 2-300 bucks from many different places. The entire price for the package would be a couple hundred more than you'd want to pay, but he'd be MUCH happier with it.


 
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