I'm shoppin' for a computer... any pointers?

[Tellis]

So yeah, I'm definitely in the market for a new PC, this one is... 6 years old? And also a Dell, so yeah, can't upgrade this hunk of plastic very easily at all.

Seeing as every other computer I've ever used hasn't been mine, and I simply inherited this one, never actually done any computer shopping before. So I ask, anyone got any advice? Any good places to look? Brands to avoid? What things I should prioritize when looking at specs? Any ways to simplify this whole thing since I'm honestly kinda lost trying to settle on something. I'm in the $600 to $800 price range, fyi. So, any help would be really appreciated, people! Thanks!

[PatientZero]

Well, for $600 to $800 you should be able to get something decent, there are a few less technical bits of information that would be handy though.

First is the obvious one, what do you want it for? Are we talking a gaming rig, or just something to get on the internet? Basically, what do you want it to do?

Second, are you looking to just but off the shelf, or are you happy to assemble it from parts? There's trade-offs either way to be honest, with an off the shelf system you can pretty much just plug it in an go, but building it yourself you can save a whole lot of money, and of course it's always nice to know exactly what's under the hood.

Last question is purely financial, are you using existing peripherals? Monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.? Kind of important because $600 for a computer is fine, but you could easily spend that on just a monitor, those things can be pricy.

[Tellis]

Oh duh, yeah those are kind of important questions. Sorry, my bad.

Gaming is definitely not my first priority, though it'd be nice to actually be able to play most mid to low-end games (for example, I've been sitting on my copy of Portal from when it was free on Steam when the Mac store opened up, on a computer that will never be able to run it). I just want to be able to run several programs at once without my computer completely slowing to a halt (as it likes to do now) and be able to process embedded Youtube videos without freezing in the middle of them.

Well, I was planning on buying a pre-built one but, is building it yourself really that much cheaper? I never really figured it would be, but then I guess most examples I've heard of it getting expensive are people buying high-end stuff. And, I'd like to probably replace the mouse and keyboard eventually (though they work) but the monitor suits my needs just fine. I guess a plus to buying a pre-built tower would be that most come with a mouse and keyboard. But yeah, not huge priorities on new peripherals.

[PatientZero]

Hmm, well that makes things nice and easy, I think pretty much any modern system that can run Windows 7 should have no trouble running Portal, provided it has an independent graphics card. (I remember playing it on a system that was made up of spare parts)

From the sounds of it you want a pretty standard balance going on, if you're going to buy a pre-built system, I'd suggest going bare bones.
A bare bones system is kind of like a base to build on, usually just a case, CD drive, mobo and psu, they're nice because you get the motherboard and processor pre-installed (which is the most nerve-jangling part of a build), they also normally come with a basic amount of RAM and a small HDD.
Then you can pretty much upgrade it as you need, add your own RAM, graphics card, drives and PCI cards, along with an OS of your choice.

I also prefer them because they're mostly sold by independents, rather than low budget mass-production companies like Dell or E-Machines.

Ultimately though, so long as you get a system with a half decent graphics card, and focus on your processor and RAM (tip: faster RAM is always better than just more RAM), you should be fine, with the current pricing on hardware you can probably get something much better than you imagine too.

[Dazz]

Yeah, easily a ram and processor thing here.
I built a quieter pc for about £500 using a few recycled parts from an old computer, whiz runs most games on full spec.

Building will probably save a few hundred bob.
First choice is whether you want to go for and AMD or Intel processor. I suggest intel, to be honest.

As my brother said, buy a bog standard bare bones machine, and stick in a graphics card (easy enough to do) and you're sorted.

[PatientZero]

Just wanted to second the Intel option, the newer generations of AMD processors have been pretty poor, I'd also suggest going for an Nvidia graphics card over an ATI card, recent support for ATI cards has been extremely poor to say the least.
(I could explain the finer details, but between power consumption comparisons and graphics artifacts it's extremely dry and boring.)

For specific hardware and numbers, you probably want to be looking around a 3 GHz dual-core processor and 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM, and something like an Nvidia Geforce 450, obviously anything better than that is a bonus, and almost definitely possible without going over your budget.
(If you spend heavily on one thing, make it the processor and motherboard, you can always upgrade the rest later, but unless you're up for some fiddly work, those are pretty well married together once they're in)