Just had a call from my parents informing me that their PC died on Thursday evening. It happened when it was powering down during a thunderstorm, and someone in the village who looked at it has suggested it is probably a fried motherboard. If they can, getting any info off the old HDD will probably fall on that guy, but I'm here to ask for suggestions for a replacement.

I've not looked at home desktops since I ordered that one for my parents, and being 8 years old that was sometime ago. They have suggested a budget in the region of 400-600 pounds and would want a replacement asap. Although I've mentioned getting a Mac to them before, if anything did go wrong I wouldn't be able to offer any support. They wouldn't be interested in any long term after sales support (rip off), and why would they when they have me?

They are also not considering a new monitor etc., current one is 1280x1024 set at a reduced, non-native and annoying resolution.

To summarise the requirements:
Budget - 400-600 pounds
Time - asap
OS - Windows 7
Apps - Office starter, basic excel and word functions are all they need, they use thunderbird for mail
Form - Mini tower or smaller
Connect to current monitor - VGA, they can get an adaptor if they need to (I may even have a VGA -> DVI knocking around)
RAM, HDD and processor - as much as possible for the budget. Won't be used for any heavy work, but needs to last several years
Brand - Any as long as they have a good reputation

TIA.

Forget getting a Mac. With that budget all you'll get is the bottom end Mac mini. Minis are for people who want a PC but can't stand one that looks like a PC and you pay for the privilege. They can do much better with a standard PC tower if they're prepared to have a PC.

To be honest, is there any reason they can't buy say a base spec Dell Inspiron for like 300 quid? For your average home user, that's still a pretty decent PC.

Jon

Thanks for responding Jon.

I'm just about to head over to Dell as sometimes you can get good deals at their outlet. The machine they have (had) is also a Dell .

I may also suggest a laptop. They have a wireless network already (setup by me for when I visit) and would have the benefit of a UPS in case of future storms. I also have a very old Pentium (700Mhz iirc) desktop running XP that could replace their current unit. It won't be good for anything other than browsing, basic excel or solitaire, but's all they use a PC for anyway.

Hopefully the urgency has been dealt with, they will try to get my old P3 working and if it does it should suffice for webmail from their provider. It looks like my brother in law may also be able to get them a hand-me-down desktop from his work.

Regardless of that they'll still need to get the files from the old HDD. The man in the village has quoted 90 pounds for a half day, is that reasonable? I'm considering offering my services, 90 pounds should cover my travel expenses, and food and lodgings would be included. I can also make sure any new hardware they get is set up properly.

That's cheap.

My mates' rate for such jobs used to be £25 p.h.

Scan do pre built systems, and they keep winning awards for customer service.

The 'V' systems should suit your needs.
The V20 might be just over budget inc VAT, but the V15 should do fine.
CLICKY

BIL has given my parents and old HP dc7700. It's an old business machine but it should suit them well enough. I have yet to find out the specs but they are still interested in a latop, finally.

It was better than I had hoped for what will be a 5-6 yo machine. C2D @ 1.86GHz, 4GB RAM, 150GB HDD, W7, Office 2010. Quite nippy compared to their previous Celeron with 512Mb and 60GB HDD.

That's better than anything in my house

Apparently there is a room at BIL's work stuffed with them. Staff just go in and help themselves. I'm not sure about the licensing terms, but it works.

Half the PCs we recently bought at work only have 4GB, and to be honest processing power simply isn't an issue for work - it's all about memory and disk performance. Even disk space is irrelevant because people shouldn't be saving to the local disk anyway, although newer bigger drives tend to be faster.

It's entirely possible our next round of PC "upgrades" will be to low-power machines. They should be more than capable in 5 years time!

Yeah the ones I rolled out to the people at work are all mini-ITX jobs but with i3 processor and SSD drive so pretty nippy for what they need.