Looking for a Computer for my birthday

[JoE15]

Well my birthday is in April and I would like to get a computer for myself. I would consider both a desktop or a Laptop. Now I need to keep it cheap, $600 or less. I really dont want a high powerd PC, just enough to get me on the internet, MS Word, a little Photoshop and maybe a game or two. So I guess that would mean at least a 1 GB RAM and around 120-160 GB Hard Drive. I would also like to buy IN STORE, not online (so I can try it out). Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Paul Komski]

Welcome JoE but you posted in a no help forum so your post has been moved to buying/upgrading.

[Erik]

$600 isn't that much for gaming. Especially if you want to buy prebuilt in a store. What games did you have in mind?

Geneally you can stretch the budget further with a desktop than a laptop. So unless you have a specific need for a laptop look at desktop macines. Do you have a monitor already, or will you need one?

At $600 for an in store computer you are going to have some problems. Most will have only 512MB of RAM and onboard video. You will be able to do better if you build your own, at least you will be able to add upgrades in the future.

[saphalline]

$600 won't get you much in a laptop, but there are some stores (depending on your location) that will sell last year's models at discounted prices. While not ideal for gaming, it really depends on what you want to play. StarCraft or Supreme Commander? :p Also, laptops are not upgradeable in general except for RAM and hard drive, so you need to make sure it has enough graphical power for the entire time you own it.

Desktops in that price range will be infinitely more desireable for gaming. They will at least be upgradeable to a point, especially the vid card which is what matters. But at $600, you won't find an off-the-shelf gaming system. What you can do is find a cheapo $450 system and spend the other $150 to upgrade it. A nice PCIe GeForce 7600 GS or Radeon X1600 with 128-256MB of RAM on it would be a worthy upgrade to any cheapo OEM system with onboard video.

[JoE15]

well I really didnt want to focus on gaming too much. I just wanted the option to play a game if I ever wanted to. I would rather focus on more basic needs such as internet, MS Word, Photoshop, and my Zune software.

What I really wanted to know is does 1 GB make a HUGE difference over 512mb?

[Erik]

What I really wanted to know is does 1 GB make a HUGE difference over 512mb?

Yes, it does. Windows can take up to 512MB of RAM itself. Then start running whatever applications you use and it gets higher. But it also depends on the types of things you do. I will typically have open Firefox (with a few tabs), Outlook, iTunes, Excel, and maybe Visio or Word. So for me I can't work with under 1GB. If you tend to just browse the web (or do only one thing at a time) then 512MB might be ok as this is a bare mnimum these days. If you want to game at all then 1GB will be necessary, and maybe even 2GB depending on what game.

Laptop vs. desktop for simple email, internet, etc. comes down to basically if you want or need to be mobile.

[saphalline]

I suppose the gaming thing depends on your usage. If you just go with onboard video, you can technically still play games ocassionally. But the performance won't be nearly as good as with a dedicated vid card.

A few months ago, I upgraded a desktop computer for gaming on a budget - going from VIA SavagePro onboard video to a cheap little 128MB GeForce 6200, as well a bump in RAM from 256MB to 768MB. Total cost was under $120. And even though I don't consider such hardware to be truly gaming capable, the upgrades nevertheless boosted performance in games such as The Sims 2 and CoD2 by over 500%! :eek: And the 3DMark 03 score increased by a factor of 15! :D

It really depends on what games you play, how much you play them, and how fast you are accustomed to playing them. My own demands on frame rate and image quality are rather high, but my brother's are much lower.