How good is windows 7 please?

My suggestion would be either -
1. Buy a new tower as suggested by steven9761 & col55555ine with Windows 7 or 8 with at least 4mb ram and buy Photoshop Elements or Lightroom.
2. If I was slightly technical savvy I'd buy a already assembled motherboard, chip and ram and bung it in my tower (reasonable prices from such as Amazon)- again with at least 4mb ram and buy Photoshop Elements (or Lightroom but would need a Windows upgrade too for this)

Or £50 cheaper on thread page 2 without the monitor but available to buy.

Sounds like a good idea (except that it is running W8:roll - generally, but one of the issues with laptops is the lack of future expandability, although you might be able to upgrade the memory as there are probably 2x DDR3 slots, and upgrading the memory on most laptops is generally very quick and easy.

Also, this one has USB 2.0 ports and I can tell you from experience that backing up a lot of data from an internal hard disk to an external disk takes a lot of time under USB2.0, so my new one has 2x USB 3.0 ports for that reason.

You might also want to add an external keyboard (as I have) because many laptop keyboards are not (exceptions being my old HP and old Dell 1525, and the latter is much better than my new Samsung :roll

BTW - HP laptops are pretty good, and the company on that website gets a lot of good reviews.

Other than that, a new tower with a good spec can be a better way to go, provided it has USB3.0 ports - and most will probably have them - and more of them on both the back and the front.

Not a bad deal on a refurb - plus, they will bundle in a monitor (although it's "pot luck" on that front!)...

Or, for an extra £50 (or thereabouts), there's this link machine from Curry/PC World. I'm guessing from the specs that this is a 32-bit machine, and it only has half the hard drive space and half the RAM memory of my new machine, but you can't go wrong with HP Compaq!

just shows thes lot of competition out there choice is yours...
i always build my own....

You can go wrong with Compaq! CPU e1-1200 Passmark 707

My core2duo T5500 from years back is 890

The refurb from col5555ine is passmark 2050

All sold out - and better to get a standard tower in most cases as this one was low-profile and thus limits any expansion cards that are fitted later.

Also HP and the like (e.g. DELL) use proprietary motherboards and PSUs for their towers, and repairs can thus be very expensive as the parts have to come from the relevant companies and not the general market place.

Suggest a tower from a smaller supplier which will use motherboards from large motherboard suppliers like Gigabyte and MSI in a standard case, as these can be replaced at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary one (and the same problem arises with most laptops - a replacement motherboard is often more than buying a completely new laptop, and most of the other parts are also proprietary!)

It's £250, I'm just making the point that if you start spending out money to upgrade old gear, you soon eat into the best part of the cost of new stuff. Spend £50 on a copy of windows, another £50 on a new disk, another £50 on "help" upgrading and so on.....

just by a imac.... £2000 grand spent then...
And it looks good..

Yup, it's what the other half does. Hence me using XP for another 12 months

Depends on what you call normal. The Home editions of Win 7 64 have a 8Gb/16GB RAM limit for basic/premium, but the pro editions allow up to 192Gb


Now I've upgraded from 6Gb to 24Gb I enjoy running lightroom, photopaint, PTGui, several instances of firefox, a 4Gb RAM drive and much other stuff simultaneously and regularly consume around 15 to 16Gb of RAM. upgrading my RAM made a huge difference to workflow. With 6Gb Lightroom used to regularly max it out and the resulting swap file mania was highly annoying.







.

Dunno what the new towers are like as this was custom built for me.

They are all quite similar, but differ quite a lot in the details. Check a magazine website like that for MicroMart or PC Pro for some case reviews (PC Pro have some in next month's issue which arrived a couple of days ago) - or the websites for good independent PC builders like Chillblast and so on as they often tell you which cases they use. Then go to Amazon or Google and search for that case and "review" as this may give you some user comments.

Also, if you like your existing case, a local PC shop could probably rebuild it with new innards for a reasonable amount - depending on the spec that you want.

That'll be brill if they could.

That's one of the crucial differences between desktops/towers & laptops because you can generally upgrade the former until it is just not suitable (won't hold enough disks, or is small and won't take the motherboard you want). I think I rebuilt my first Viglen desktop with at least 6 new motherboards over a period of about 7-8yrs until I was running of physical space inside - and then I bought a huge server case (I called it the Eiffel Tower and it JUST fits under my desk!) and put several generations of m/b in that too.

I only went the laptop route when it became obvious that I needed something I could take to work with me - but the big tower is still sitting under my desk, and awaiting the day when I can decide exactly what to fit into it. The time may soon be available as I am now semi-retired!