Hi all my grandparents have asked me to build them a new rig as they are getting into editing their old pictures that they took back in the 60s which have now become distorted and they also use the rig to surf the net and do word processing they dont do any cd ripping or encoding. This is what i have come up with i just want to get some advice before i order it. CPU: AMD 2500 Mobo: Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0 Ram: Twin Mos PC2700 HDD: Samsung Spinpoint 80gb Richman
downgrade the CPU and MOBO to cheapies and up the ram cause they're not gonna be restarting every couple of mins and also get a decent vid card and monitor
ya i agree get something, like a true all in one board, with agp slot. stick a decent, videocard, as much memory as you can, get a GOOD monitor, and perhaps some GOOD picture editing software.
they do not need a good vid card for phot editing get them a mobo with onboard graphiocs sound lan etc and around a 2000+ will do however durons do not perform as well as athlons in photoshop etc as much ram as possible and as much storage as necessary IMHO
Its not as if they'd EVER tell the difference in performance, cmon, its pinch of salt area. I agree with the others - spend the money on what theyll notice more: A nice DVI LCD and cheap, but decent DVI (radeon 9200?) AGP card will suffice. Onboard video tends to be uber crap quality at the best of times.
nf7-s? do they have a need for sata? surely a standard version would be more suitable and a pata hdd? I agree, what you mentioned is a tad overkill, something cheaper would do the job just as well. A good monitor is definitely something that would get noticed, a decent CRT imo unless desk space is tight
you dont need a good vid card to edit pictures. a pci card would work fine. same with movies. your vid card doesn't have to do any 3d rendering for photo/video editing. i think the only time its used (in video editing software) is if you use the open gl plug in (as opposed to software rendering) in 3ds max. sure you need good color, but almost any vid card can provide that. also, for pic editing, they could use adobe photoshop elements 2.
Speaking as somebody who built computers for his grandparents, get them a Dell. I love my grandparents dearly, but I was getting a call every 15 minutes for tech support like "My thing says something about the thing that needs the thing to do the thing, what do I do?" So I took the weasel way out and made them somebody else's problem. I should add my grandparents are WWII generation. Younger grandparents may not be so bad.
HAHAHAHHAHAHAAHA I know exactly how you feel. I run a small PC business on the side which deals in high performance gaming rigs. And my mam decided she wanted a machine for Boadband and watching flash animations. This was the day and many more anfter i regretted being her son- of course because shes my mam, she wanted it dirttttt cheap (shes a skin flint) and ASAP. shes a very impatient women! so she wanted one that evening -the cheapest one i could build was £1100 @ cost price I said i wouldnt do it any cheaper and i got the silent treatment -after a few hours of this i gave in (Its embarrassing how much i sold it for -so i wont say) and built it for her. while i was building it -she wanted the best of everything day after, she rings me up -bear in mind i just spent 7hours building and setting it up! she goes and disables the firewall and gets a boot sector virus. this happened several times for several weeks. different viruses each time and atleast 20 formats -i didnt charge her but i did keep a log for intrest reasons. the reason she disabled the firewall was because she didnt like the noise it made when it intercepted an attack and she hated the dialog boxes oh and took it upon herself to fix the virus by yanking the sata cables out of the hard drive when it was on. all sorts of wierd **** like that. shes been through two motherboards and 4 sticks of ram -XMS ram i may add. I know this is a kind of rant, but i can laugh about it now -as i employed a friend to help when its busy and he gets lumbered with her calls Lesson - never build PCs for people you know -you get the piss taken right out of you -you will suddenly become tech support for them and possibly there friends -as you all probably know. mine was a true and extreme example of what happens . A watercooled P4EE for surfing the net -FFS
who of you have tried using the blur tool on a crap vid card on a 1600x1280 image. i do websites for modeling agents and casting agents so i know about image editing and my brother is a a film maker so he needs me to make him puters able to do 3d animation and use premiere. but to be honest you should get them macromedia studio and install freehand and fireworks and possably flash so they can make a slide show outta it but try to get them a big 19"crt or 17"TFT monitor so and a nice mouse and keyboard because its not like they're gonna take notice of the specs and they'll look at it and go "wow thats a really comfortable keyboard and mouse and this monitor is is just super fly". if you get what i mean. old people are more likely to like the outside than the inside. edit: oh and yes i know about the hassles of getting called up at 10 at night with "my disk drive wont work. i didn't do anything honest" and then going round there and finding cheese inside of it. i just shook my head and walked away after fixing it.
I have spoke to my grandparents and they want teh best computer possible so that they wont have to upgrade becuase it is too slow for them in the future so this is what i have come up with, how does it sound to you before i go and order it.
for the psu, a 400w antec jobby will do fine. The stock hsf should be fine aslong as your not o/cing.
I really don't see that much point in getting the NF7-S to run at stock... And a 3000+ :S I would recommend a XP-M, or even a normal 2500+ and put it at a nice stable ~2.2GHz. This way you would actually be using the RAM at DDR400, rather than DDR333, plus much better performance for ~£40 less.
