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!

Louise - I suppose the bottom line is: what is your likely budget to get a pc the way you are aspiring to? If it means a new motherboard, more memory, bigger hard-drive, more powerful graphics, etc then I think most of us would agree that you would be better off buying a whole new tower (if your monitor still works, no point in buying a full system with a new monitor, unless that's something else you want). If you have a printer that's relatively new, the manufacturer will probably have up-to-date drivers for it, in the event that Windows Update can't find them.

Considering the hassle of getting somebody to install all these parts for you, and getting everything to work together inside the computer, I think it's best to invest in a new tower.

2Gb of ram on a 32-bit should be fine. Provided you are not also running a computer program that controls unmanned deep-space orbiters, or anything else that's memory-intensive in tandem with PS/PSE, or Lightroom it should be okay. You may occasionally find that Adobe may momentarily "freeze", but that usually only occurs when the program needs to use up all the ram. Did you know that you can also use a usb stick as additional ram? Microsoft calls this READYBOOST - here's the link.

Your computer is most likely to recognise your camera simply as a "MASS STORAGE DEVICE", and I shouldn't think you will have any issues with uploading your photos from the camera to your pc. If you do encounter any problems, then running that particular MSD in compatability mode (set to be compatible with XP) should overcome that.

As John said, a card reader will get you out of any bother the camera-to-pc may throw at you.

Not really any caveats. My post clearly indicates that a 32-bit os should be okay with 2Gb (max 4Gb ram on a W7 32-bit os). W7 64-bit will not normally run higher than 8Gb ram. The theoretical maximum ram in a W8 64-bit is, I believe, 512Gb ram, but since none of us here are planning deep-space missions into parallel universes, then we won't need that much ram!!

TBH: if the system Louise is currently running is that "old" and becoming expensive to upgrade the individual components, she might be cheaper to buy a desktop unit. These can be bought seperately, as well as part of a system. I recently bought a Compaq 2930EA tower for around £300. Only drawback is that it's upgradeability is somewhat limited (CPU soldered to the board, only one port for the DVD drive, 2 mounts for the ram, no pci-express bus. That said, I'm upgrading my old HP desktop, which now has a 64-bit os (the old mobo was config'ed to 32-bit), I've got a blu-ray writer and a dvd writer on board, 8Gb ram, an Nvidia graphics card, plus I'm in the process of adding a 4-port usb 2.0 card, and a 4-port usb 3.0 card. Currently, I have 2Tb (2 x 1Tb) HDD on board, plus a tv capture card installed.

Louise - if you run the UPGRADE ADVISOR from the link posted earlier, it'll tell you where your machine's "shortcomings" are, if any. If you are running a 32-bit operating system, then 2Gb ram is plenty, however if you have a 64-bit machine, you will need at least 4Gb, but I'd advise 8Gb if you are running "heavy" programs such as photo editing suites, video editing suites, etc. 4Gb is fine if you will only be using it for email, internet, playing music and videos via Windows Media Player though.

Mowser - have you had a look on the Epson website to see if there is an update or separate utility for monitoring ink levels? If you've had the printer since XP, it's perhaps time to look at a new printer anyway, as your current printer is possibly approaching the end of its shelf life.

John - please accept my abject apologies for not spotting the spam that TRENT900 was talking about. I'm trying to avoid processed meat at the moment!!

Ken - the following link probably explains it better. Paragraph 2, sentence 1 explains what I was meaning, a bit better than I could have explained it. Basically, if light takes longer to reach an object in water than it does in air, then something has to give - in this case the shutter speed needs to be slowed down to capture the information.

Ken - I think the scientific answer is light diffraction - light travels at a different wavelength through water than it does through air.

Try to avoid PC World like the plague!!.. My experiences of them that they are over-priced, some of the staff talk in "techno-babble", and will sometimes install parts that are not neccessarily required. As John says - either the little "corner-shop" computer guy, or one of the house-call engineers. John has given sound advice too!