pointers & reccs for a 'new' PC <£300 please

I've had enough & the GF has discovered my older dual core laptop which she says goes like whizz on her stupid facebook flashplayer type games. So we need a 'new' tower for her.

Have keyboards/mice & a few PSUs here. She already has a fairly decent monitor (mind you I'd like it..). And several full size tower cases as well. Official XP is the latest discs & Office 2003 (which is good enough) we have here. Suppose Win7 might be useful. Dunno.

So bang for my buck please. In many ways I'm tired of mucking about (don't mind on mine) & rather have it known good & working. Seen a couple of zoostorm barebones for same damned price as the mobo bundle alone.

Yes I am being lazy but I'm a bit thin about what happened between dual core porcessors & the i3/5/7. To shut things up I wouldn't mind if it came with a blu-ray player in it, but not if it's as much as stand alone which frankly we could both share. I'd rather not spend anything like the £300-that was earmarked for a tablet also mostly for her benefit & a quieter life for me.

Primary uses: bloody FB, some basic photoshop, magazine editing, usual office stuff. Suppose a SSD would be handy but all the HDDs we have here are old IDE rather than sata. Mind you I could stuff the lot into the 6 bays the server case offers!

what she has now:
venice cpu athlon 64XP o/c to 2.4Ghz, 2GB ram with an asus 4650 1GB AGP card ASUS - - ASUS AH4650/DI/1GD2

blasted usurping laptop:
Acer Support: Aspire 5630 Specifications on 4GB ram & Vista

Whatever we go with it needs to outperform that laptop because it's mine & I want it back.

TIA.

You've flattened the desktop, re-installed and tried that, right? It seems to me the old hardware should run facebook and flash games just fine..

you got any OS install disks, or do you need to buy a PC with it pre-installed?

novatech are good, been using them for years.

several sub £300 systems here - Buy Desktop PCs and Computers from Novatech

In case you is terrible:

http://www.therevcounter.co.uk/freecyc...er-casing.html

If you do use novatech to build one. I have 2GB stick of DDR3. 244 pin, 1333 If you need extra. Upgraded mine today. FOC.

If you only need a mb, processor and memory, as long as you buy the right ivy bridge kit you can make a hackintosh for less than £250 and have a mac and a pc. Mac osx is only £12 or so

Originally Posted by Kebab The Cat

You've flattened the desktop, re-installed and tried that, right? It seems to me the old hardware should run facebook and flash games just fine..

crumbs yes-all clean & chipset updated from manufacturers etc. Runs youtube etc fine for me when I use it. Tell you what I did wonder yesterday-I was updating the AV & my d/l speeds went up to not much & down to nearly zero on my wired connection. The laptop she's using is wireless & I'm wondering if it's somehow grabbing all the bandwidth? Bandwidth is appalling here <0.5MB.

Originally Posted by easy now andy

you got any OS install disks, or do you need to buy a PC with it pre-installed?

novatech are good, been using them for years.

several sub £300 systems here - Buy Desktop PCs and Computers from Novatech

yeah-love Novatech! Have proper XP but not 7 though.

What about the below? The one she has is a zoostorm & it's been pretty rock solid over the years.

Zoostorm Desktop PC - Desktops | Ebuyer.com

I replace my desktop every 3 or 4 years with summink from here http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/I...ookieSupport=1

Originally Posted by Editor

yeah-love Novatech! Have proper XP but not 7 though.

What about the below? The one she has is a zoostorm & it's been pretty rock solid over the years.

Zoostorm Desktop PC - Desktops | Ebuyer.com

very similar spec for the money. you do like your AMD processors, don't you!

might be worth the OS upgrade to x64 to utilise extra RAM, any CPU you buy these days will be 64bit.