I hadn't had a desktop PC in ages until my father gave me his old one last summer (read: old is 2009, it was a very respectable machine with a failed hard drive). Bought a new HD, installed Ubuntu and used it for about nine months. Ubuntu is a great free OS but I'm what you might call knowledgeable enough about computers to really fuck one up, and I finally got fed up with Ubuntu because you are very limited in terms of hardware; there simply aren't drivers for a lot of devices.
So, not having actually bought a desktop since 2003, I had little idea what they were going for these days. I was amazed to spend $400 and bring home an AMD quad-core (A6-3620) with 4 GB RAM (upgraded to 8 for $30, holy shit did RAM ever get cheap since I last bought any) and W7 Home Premium 64. It was a huge upgrade over my last Windows machine and after four months I've been completely satisfied with it, even though it was a mid-grade Wal-Mart offering. It came with a 500 GB HD which I do want to supplement with something bigger, because I've already filled up three quarters of it. I later purchased a 27" LED monitor for about $300.
I'm not really into intensive things such as modern gaming or A/V editing, mostly just basic stuff really, and for relative chump change I have a machine which is still far more capable than I need it to be.
So, not having actually bought a desktop since 2003, I had little idea what they were going for these days. I was amazed to spend $400 and bring home an AMD quad-core (A6-3620) with 4 GB RAM (upgraded to 8 for $30, holy shit did RAM ever get cheap since I last bought any) and W7 Home Premium 64. It was a huge upgrade over my last Windows machine and after four months I've been completely satisfied with it, even though it was a mid-grade Wal-Mart offering. It came with a 500 GB HD which I do want to supplement with something bigger, because I've already filled up three quarters of it. I later purchased a 27" LED monitor for about $300.
I'm not really into intensive things such as modern gaming or A/V editing, mostly just basic stuff really, and for relative chump change I have a machine which is still far more capable than I need it to be.
