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frogboy

frogboy

frogboy

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11 May 2004
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516
I am going to build a PC for my mum just for surfing the net, e-mail, webcam and wordprocessing. Here is what I am planning on getting:


MB-088-AB Abit KN8 SLi nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-088-AB)
£64.99

CP-117-AM AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3000BPBOX) (CP-117-AM)
£41.99

HD-051-SE Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB ST3808110AS SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-051-SE)
£28.99

MY-004-GL GeIL 512MB (2x256MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5 (GE5123200BHDC) (MY-004-GL)
£34.99

CD-037-NE NEC ND3550 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Silver) - OEM (CD-037-NE)
£18.50

NW-011-NG Netgear WG311 54Mbps Wireless PCI Adapter (NW-011-NG)
£23.95

Subtotal £213.41
VAT £37.35
Total £250.76

We already have a case and I will buy a cheap power supply. Is there anything I can do to bring the price down? apart from putting in 256MB of memory. This PC will run XP Home.

Also

What would need to be upgraded in order to run Vista when it comes out? Could I get away with adding more memory? or would i be needing a new processor, hard drive etc?

Thanks
 
Your most immediate problem is the lack of a graphics card unless you have one spare? If not I'd suggest going for the Abit NF95 mATX motherboard or indeed any mATX motherboard using the Nforce 6100 or 6150 chipset which has onboard graphics.

You could get the Samsung 80gb hard drive to bring the price down by another couple of pounds.

The other option is to go AM2 which will in theory at least offer better potential for upgrading in the future however I really doubt that you'd want to run Vista on the PC as it stands and I definitely wouldn't be considering it as an upgrade in the near future with a (relatively speaking) low specification PC.
 
frogboy said:
Do mATX motherboards fit in normal ATX cases?

So Vista is never going to run on such a system? Even if I added 2GB+ of RAM?..
Click to expand...

Yes, it is just a smaller form factor so you get fewer PCI slots and a few other minor things but basically most of the features from a 'full' sized motherboard.

Sorry if I wasn't clear before, Vista will almost certainly run, how well is another question entirely and probably not one you will need to consider for quite a while. I'd stick with XP for the forseeable future as it is easy to get a configuration that is solid enough for everyday use, something that can't necessarily be guaranteed with Vista(yet), the only other reason that I can see for upgrading to Vista is for the shiny new effects, most of which you won't see on a PC that isn't currently high specification.
 
Yes, it will cope with that sort of resolution fine, provided that you allocate enough Ram to it(32mb or 64mb ought to do easily). If you are gaming then that might be more of a problem for onboard but even then it is a fairly capable system.
 
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