£300 PC challange (with tft)!

[s3ds]

Around christmas i saw a number of decent(ish) spec dell machines coming in at the £300 mark inc monitor.

I have been comissioned by a family member to buy a pc with a budget of £300, and after days of searching i cant seem to find any good deals.

The best i can find at the moment is this Dell:
PROCESSOR Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core E2140 Processor (1.6GHz,800MHz,1MB cache)
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Business
HARDWARE SUPPORT Base Warranty - 1 Year Business Hardware Support
MONITOR Dell™ 17" Black Wide Flat Panel (E178WFP) - UK/Irish
MEMORY 1024MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x512]
HARD DRIVE 250GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache
GRAPHICS CARD Integrated Intel® Graphic Media Accelerator X3100
OPTICAL DRIVE 16x DVD +/- RW Drive
KEYBOARD Dell™ Entry Quietkey USB Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY)
MOUSE Dell 2 Button USB Optical Mouse

Can anyone spec anything better within a £300 budget.

I am happy to self build and have a spare core2duo compatible motherboard with intergrated graphics i could use.

i would be most greatful!

with it having Windows Vista® Business does the £300 Include Vat + Delivery ?

[Pob255]

The OP already says he has a spare Core2 compatiable motherboard with integrated graphics which he can use for the build.

And you've already mentioned that once.
Please people read the WHOLE thread before posting.


back to the topic, I'd pritty much agree with the builds both mike and cat have posted, yes you can build a basic pc for £300 if you have a spare motherboard with vga (note I don't think I saw keyboard &mouse on thoes builds but that's only £10 extra)

Saying that, at the really low budget end it's very hard to beat dell, although be prepaired to remove a metric-s**t-load of pointless resource chewing software that dell hard drives come pre-smeard in.

One intresting thing to note is that I do believe that dell are now 100% stock, the inspron 530 is deffinately a stock atx case and components

[staffsMike]

If the OP is a vostro they are shipped with pretty much no rubbish you don't need installed so that shouldn't factor into your decision.

I havn't actually had a vostro desktop but based on the vostro laptops and the latitude desktops it won't have any rubbish on it.

[Pob255]

Well the latitude laptops we had did have crud on them, but as we just ghosted them all with our own image it wasn't a problem

norton trial, 4 internet sign up exe's and a most annoying adobe image browser

[staffsMike]

strange. I got the new 630 and 830 laptops in and they were clean .. but I did insist to my account manager they came that way.