Spec my friend's mum...

Man of Honour
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
13,262
Location
Northallerton/Harrogate
A PC to just do office stuff on at home.
Needs to be quiet, not too big (smaller the better, really). No gaming/massively powerful stuff required. Just better than what she currently has.

She currently has a Dell thing, but it sounds like there's a helicopter in it these days, not sure how old it is but it came with Vista installed, so pre windows 7.

Also what's a good home printer these days?
 
I've upgraded from 4gb to 8gb of ram due to the 4gb stick being out of stock and put in a 1tb HDD as it was only an extra £4 but here's something I put together.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
  • 1 x "Primo Pro AX" Configurable AMD A Series APU Office PC = £322.00
    • Build Time:Standard Build Systems - Dispatched within 7 working days
    • Secondary Hard Drive / Solid State Drive:No Second Hard Drive Option (ZERO Cost)
    • Optical Drive:OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM
    • AMD Processor:AMD A4-4000 3.00GHz (Socket FM2) APU Richland Dual Core Processor (AD4000OKHLBOX)
    • Networking:Networking Not Selected
    • Warranty:OcUK Standard System Warranty - 3 Year (24 Month C&R + 12 Month Labour)
    • Memory:Team Group Elite Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TPKD38G1600HC11DC01)
    • Primary Hard Drive / Solid State Drive:Seagate 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache HDD - OEM (ST1000DM003)
    • Operating System:Microsoft Windows 10 64-Bit DVD - OEM (MS-KW9-00139)
    • Security Software:Unwanted

Total: £336.10
(includes shipping: £14.10)


 
Gibiotech- have you ever used an A4? They conjure visions of hanging oneself or choking back some cyanide. A brutal experience. Just too slow to get anything done IMO.

No sense buying an APU for an office machine. The additional graphics performance is wasted and the CPU cores are weak. Much better to get an i3 or at very least Pentium based machine.

An SSD is a MUST for snappy performance. There is rarely a need for 1TB hard drives in office machines and for a marginally higher price, a mid-range SATA III SSD in the 250GB range just makes more sense honestly.

I had, at the same time, an A4 based machine with a hard drive and a Pentium G3258 based machine with an SSD and the difference between the two was jaw dropping. The Pentium machine was pleasant to use. The A4 machine made me want to rip all my hair out.
 
Gibiotech- have you ever used an A4? They conjure visions of hanging oneself or choking back some cyanide. A brutal experience. Just too slow to get anything done IMO.

No sense buying an APU for an office machine. The additional graphics performance is wasted and the CPU cores are weak. Much better to get an i3 or at very least Pentium based machine.

An SSD is a MUST for snappy performance. There is rarely a need for 1TB hard drives in office machines and for a marginally higher price, a mid-range SATA III SSD in the 250GB range just makes more sense honestly.

I had, at the same time, an A4 based machine with a hard drive and a Pentium G3258 based machine with an SSD and the difference between the two was jaw dropping. The Pentium machine was pleasant to use. The A4 machine made me want to rip all my hair out.

To be honest I haven't, I've configured a completely separate system based on your suggestions then.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
  • 1 x "Primo Pro iX" Configurable Intel Pentium / Core i3/i5 Office PC = £414.01
    • Build Time:Standard Build Systems - Dispatched within 7 working days
    • Secondary Hard Drive / Solid State Drive:No Second Hard Drive Option (ZERO Cost)
    • Optical Drive:No Optical Drive Selected
    • Intel Processor:Intel Pentium G3260 3.30GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail
    • Warranty:OcUK Standard System Warranty - 3 Year (24 Month C&R + 12 Month Labour)
    • Networking:Networking Not Selected
    • Primary Hard Drive / Solid State Drive:Samsung 250GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 32 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-75E250B/EU)
    • Operating System:Microsoft Windows 10 64-Bit DVD - OEM (MS-KW9-00139)
    • Memory:Team Group Elite Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TPKD38G1600HC11DC01)
    • Security Software:Unwanted

Total: £428.11
(includes shipping: £14.10)


 
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