Sometimes, you have no other choice but to buy a new PC. Take note though, just because a desktop is cheap in price doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t worth your time. There are plenty of decent PCs for under $700, and even under $500 (without monitor, of course). Not everyone needs the power found in a $2,000 to $3,000 multimedia powerhouse, let alone the overclocked processors and dual graphics cards found in the $5K Gaming PC Club. What many users are looking for is a simple, competent system that’s easy to set up, and won’t be too much of a bother when they grab snapshots off of their digital camera, view their home videos, and maybe even re-encode both to post to the family Web site or social network.
While you won’t get 3D gaming-class graphics out of these systems, you will get a hard drive larger than the 80GB or so that your old system may have come with, a media card reader, and a reasonably speedy dual-core processor like the AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors found in the Compaq Presario SR5130NX, eMachines T5234, and HP Pavilion a6130n or the Pentium E2160 in the Systemax Venture E21. These bargain-priced desktops are more than capable of handling your digital life. Still, I encourage potential buyers to up their system memory to 2GB. It shouldn’t a huge premium, and it will measurably improve the performance of multimedia programs such as Adobe Photoshop Elements. You’ll spend less time staring at that spinning circle (or hourglass) while you wait for your computer to do something.
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