Whats a decent spec for a home PC today ?

[Turn7]

Im happy with it, regardless.

Itunes is up and ready to use in less than the blink of an eye wehreas previously was 30 seconds or so.....

[ZesPak]

Turn7 said:

Just to update this...

I bought a Kingston SSD and mirrored my old hard drive onto it. Once up and running I upgraded to Win10.

PC now boots to desktop in less than 40 seconds.

It also seems a lot more stable.

Nice. With the SSD you've got the best upgrade out of the way. A stick of RAM can go a long way too, takes seconds to install and will cost bugger all.

5 years is about right for a mid-life upgrade on a PC. We usually do a reinstall as well though but if it works without there isn't much reason to.

[marcosgt]

I'd say you need more than 4GB RAM to be honest (If those saying "that's a decent spec" mean the current PC).

Photo processing chews memory like mad!

M.

[weeboot]

mikef said:

10 seconds if it's UEFI - a 2010 system may be a regular old-fashioned BIOS, so 25-40 seconds is probably about right to boot from SSD

My old school BIOS machine is in the region of 30-40 seconds to a usable desktop, so it sounds about right to me. From a cold boot, of course.

[loudlashadjuster]

Definitely SSD, and some more memory if budget allows. As far as general day to day computing tasks goes CPU performance hasn't really gone anywhere in the last five years, but an SSD will make you wonder how you ever managed without one.

Do try and get a decent one though, there are a few "slower" ones knocking around (OCZ Trion drives for example) that while still miles faster than most HDDs in most tasks are only a few quid cheaper than a properly-specced SSD like a decent Samsung or Sandisk.

Turn7 said:

My current OS came prebundled so I dont have a disc. Would I be able to DL W10 foc onto the ssd ?

If it's a Dell/HP etc. and has a proper OEM license then the BIOS should have the licence key cached and you should be able just to install Windows 10 (assuming you have upgraded to it already) from any media and it will activate automatically, if not during install then once up and running.

The trouble is getting hold of the media to install it legally. Microsoft in their wisdom have removed the easy route that used to be available to get hold of the disc images. Maybe a friendly IT bod at work could help out?

If not and you are the first owner then the manufacturer can usually send you a disc, but they'll probably make you jump through hoops for it.

Don't try and copy an HDD install over to SSD though, it will bring all the previous problems with you and potentially leave many HAL/Windows settings incorrectly set for use with solid state storage.

[pozi]

loudlashadjuster said:

The trouble is getting hold of the media to install it legally. Microsoft in their wisdom have removed the easy route that used to be available to get hold of the disc images. Maybe a friendly IT bod at work could help out?

If not and you are the first owner then the manufacturer can usually send you a disc, but they'll probably make you jump through hoops for it.

Can't you just use the media creation tool from this link and create a bootable USB or DVD ?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/...

[J4CKO]

Going through this at the moment,

The suggestion for my new one from my PC expert friend, for office stuff and some reasonably futureproofed gaming, but not the ultimate, 4k or anything like that, without going overboard and spending more than I need, he said,

a current Intel i5 (Skylake)
8Gb of DDR4, poss 16 but any more is total overkill for most.
Decent SSD
GTX 960 (970 if can stretch a few extra quid)
Quality LGA 1151 motherboard and decent cooler
750W Corsair PSU


I have a shopping list and its about £880 for that lot with 970 and 16 Gb of Ram, 256 GB SSD etc

All a bit old school building a PC, its like 1995 all over again

[loudlashadjuster]

pozi said:

Can't you just use the media creation tool from this link and create a bootable USB or DVD ?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/...

Ahh yes, that should work

[ZesPak]

J4CKO said:

Going through this at the moment,

The suggestion for my new one from my PC expert friend, for office stuff and some reasonably futureproofed gaming, but not the ultimate, 4k or anything like that, without going overboard and spending more than I need, he said,

a current Intel i5 (Skylake)
8Gb of DDR4, poss 16 but any more is total overkill for most.
Decent SSD
GTX 960 (970 if can stretch a few extra quid)
Quality LGA 1151 motherboard and decent cooler
750W Corsair PSU


I have a shopping list and its about £880 for that lot with 970 and 16 Gb of Ram, 256 GB SSD etc

All a bit old school building a PC, its like 1995 all over again

If it's not for gaming, the onboard graphics in the i5 are plenty .