New PC required - any recommendations?

[Dark Black]

About time I got a new PC for the home office - aiming to spend approx 500 - 600 quid.

So not a gaming PC (for the office remember), mainly used for admin (email / office etc), software dev and able to cope well with virtual machine images.

Was tempted by the Dell Optiplex ranges but also seen some good reviews of Palicomp and ChillBlast boxes - anybody here have experience of them?

[d000hg]

To be honest for that kind of money I'd say just buy one from PCWorld or Currys or Staples or Dell, whichever seems the best deal and has any extra software/peripherals. The only thing is to try and make sure you get a Windows disc so you can wipe and re-install for a crud-free machine (insert hilarious gag about a crud free windows machine being an oxymoron).

If you don't play games Dell might be best bet and get a business-focused PC, but you're aiming at the part of the market it's just a box with some bits in.

[VectraMan]

Last time I looked there was a Dell Vostro i5 with decent sized monitor for about that price, which seemed like a pretty good deal. You might even be able to get it in an i7 for £600. Probably powerful enough for the email/office etc. of a small country.

[adubya]

I went for a Dell Vostro i7 thing with a 23" widescreen monitor, was about £600 last Christmas.

Does the biz easily, I could probably flog the spare CPU capacity to NASA.

[cojak]

I hate Dell with a passion after having to do a full reinstall of my brother's PC last Christmas, updating the proprietary drivers was a bloody nightmare.

Anything but Dell.

[d000hg]

I hate Dell with a passion after having to do a full reinstall of my brother's PC last Christmas, updating the proprietary drivers was a bloody nightmare.

Anything but Dell.

Other than on a laptop why would you need proprietary drivers... with XP maybe but W7 is so much better for such things.

[minestrone]

I hate Dell with a passion after having to do a full reinstall of my brother's PC last Christmas, updating the proprietary drivers was a bloody nightmare.

Anything but Dell.

WCS.

Never buying dell again.

Got my last desktop from the local shop for local people, paid about 100 quid more than I could have got online but when a component failed it was sorted in 10 minutes by just going down to the shop, spent days on the phone to dell trying to get a bob to understand basic PC infrastructure, last time spent 2 hours trying to convince bob the machine was busted, argued with me the whole time, when the engineer they eventually sent round looked at the machine the first thing he said was "what is wrong with that".

[gingerjedi]

I'd pick one up from PC world after my recent experience of trying to buy a customised PC online.

I first ordered from Mesh but after a month of zero communication and reading about their financial shenanigans I canceled, then I ordered from Dino-PC (recommended by someone on here) again a month later I'm still waiting despite several promises that I'd have it this week.

Do these companies honestly expect to survive with such shoddy service? I just fired off an email demanding a refund.

[b0redom]

Either Scan.co.uk, local computer shop, or build it yourself.

I bought a Fujitsu Siemens box recently, then decided to add extra drives. No space in the chassis, despite having extra SATA headers, so I decided to move the lot into a larger chassis.

Fujitsu appear to have mobos which mount upside down so don't fit in normal chassis.

HP and Dell and the rest of them use a similar weird setup.

[Sysman]

I bought a Fujitsu Siemens box recently, then decided to add extra drives. No space in the chassis, despite having extra SATA headers, so I decided to move the lot into a larger chassis.

Fujitsu appear to have mobos which mount upside down so don't fit in normal chassis.

HP and Dell and the rest of them use a similar weird setup.

I bought a cheap 'n' cheerful noname last year. Plenty of space for disk expansion but it takes some older sort of RAM which is still pricy to go from 4GB to 8GB.