looking for a new computer up to £550 mark, monitor not required, should i stick with win xp home or should i upgrade anyone care to point me in the right direction?
I prefer XP ... anyway Vista is being replaced in October If you're looking for a good deal then Aldi usually have some decent deals .. high spec at low prices. Have a look in Computer active
RE: I prefer XP ... anyway Vista is being replaced in October Aye, should have scrapped Vista at Beta & gone straight onto 7.</p> Aldi got a Quad on at the moment if yer can find one. http://www.aldi.co.uk/uk/html/offers/58_9910.htm </p>
You could build a very decent quad core for that price Good motherboard 4 gig memory a terrabyte of storage, good quality graphics a freeview tv card. Use your old XP and roberts your dads brother even.
RE: You could build a very decent quad core for that price thanks for the replies ,building one sounds ok but a tadge beyond my expertise i think
Not as difficult as it soundsbut if you're not confident then I'm sure there's indepent shops that could put you something together
Build your own You can't reuse a Windows XP OEM licence. I assume it's not a retail licence you have? When you type in the serial and try to activate it, it sends info about the contents of the PC to Microsoft. If the motherboard has changed it won't activate. I am not a fan of Vista but 7 looks promising. You can download a free, legit copy of the pre-release version of Windows 7 but it will expire in March 2010 IIRC. There's no way to upgrade to the real thing so it will mean buying 7 and reinstalling early next year at the latest. However, beats paying for Vista now I'd say. Building is pretty straightforward. I'm doing about a £1300 system next month for a mate for professional music production. Could stick some extra stuff on the component order. When the stuff comes, come down and we'll knock it together. PM me if you're interested. Any luck with the misbehaving laptop BTW?
Not had any problem transfering XP Last 4 systems i built have had re used XP licences, all activated straight away and still the same, I had to phone for one and that went through without any problem at all. Just completed a i7 system they are very very fast and stable, totally overclockable with some safety. 8 cores DDR3 , 3Tb storage and the best bit................ a totally silent graphics card. the whole lot is whisper quiet.
What gfx did you put in? Wanting dual DVI ideally but best fanless card I can find is a nVIDIA 9500GT but with 1 VGA and 1 HDMI If the XP licences are retail then you're ok. but OEM XP licences (as in bundled with the old PC by the manufacturer) won't reactivate. Or certainly never used to - not tried in a while they may have relaxed the checks now XP is such an old OS.
If you upgrade your motherboard or too many of hard drive/cpu/sound card etc that they think it's another machine then it wont work but you can just phone the number to register over the phone and the person on the other end (in india) will give you a new product key straight away, most of the time you don't even have to give a reason but if you do just say you've installed a new motherboard etc and hey presto, new key. Never had any problems doing that myself.
Blimey Replaced a faulty motherboard in my father in law's PC and that was that. The board was under warranty but was discontinued and a better one provided by way of exchange. XP Home and Office 2003 both defunct. No sympathy and certainly no help from MS. His work had provided Office and renewed it for him but he ended up buying a new Windows key. I was so hacked off it was one of the reasons I ditched Windows in the first place.
RE: What gfx did you put in? you can put any you like in , i bought a no fan cooler called the fridge, cos it looks like the back of one. unscrew the fan and housing, bit of extra grease onto the surface and then screw the pipework on. You can also add larger fans if you want to, I've left it bare and its stable. http://www.scythe.co.jp/cooler/jes988.html Its on a Geforce 9600 at the moment. but i don't do games just graphics and DVD rendering so maybe a gamer would need some fans on.
Hmmm He'll use hardware x264 rendering so I think I'll stick with the 9500 that's passively cooled out of the box. Thanks anyway.
