What computer?

[Incy]

We have Acer desktops and OH bought me this laptop a week or so ago.
I would definitely avoid mini towers and also windows vista as an operating system. We have found that it simply cannot cope with the dual core machine and the fans are constantly in overdrive.
The new laptop has windows 7 and is an absolute delight to use. MS office 2007 is a pretty good piece of software and allows you to save documents so that they can still be opened in previous versions of office (a lot of people, including businesses are still using much older versions). I would expect you to be able to get a decent machine either desktop or laptop for around or under £400. MS office is I believe around £70 so if it's already loaded you can expect the machine to reflect that in the price.
The link I've posted above is a really good company and their prices are usually pretty good too so it may be worth a browse around their site.
Good luck with whatever you decide to get.

[Dottie]

I had a quick look at desktops today in PC World and all were set up with Windows 7, but for (excel and usual stuff) you had to pay another £70 on top of prices quoted.

[di]

Thankyou everyone for your input.
I got someone to come shopping with me over the weekend and although I had 'Dell' imprinted in my mind(OK,pretty purple )we couldn't find any Dell desktops in any of the shops in Ipswich,just laptops.
I know it may sound odd to some of you,but I'm a little nervous about buying biggish things online...I have to be able to see and touch before I buy
Anyway,we bought a make and model very similar to one they have...an Acer something...it was stock clearance so apparently a fairly good deal.So far so good...I even set it all up all by myself

In case you think advice wasn't listened to...I had the option of buying Office something or other for £70 instead of £90...I kindly declined and will be getting it from the Software$students site...not only far cheaper but also the one on there for £40 has lots more bells than the package they were trying to sell.
So thankyou,without all your input I'd have probably gone into the shop thinking I needed to buy everything they put in front of me...and a word processor

[smallblueplanet]

...I know it may sound odd to some of you,but I'm a little nervous about buying biggish things online...I have to be able to see and touch before I buy

Lol! I hope you're happy with your pc, that's what matters. Good call on the software.

[taff]

well done di

I downloaded ccleaner for all the cleaning up...

Brill isn't it? especially since I actually looked a lot closer at the advanced section and got rid of all those damn hotfix uninstallers [still got xp on the machine that went poof...]. So much more room, so much more to download

[di]

Lol! I hope you're happy with your pc, that's what matters. Good call on the software.

Well it's not purple ...so far all seems fine(and it's tucked away out of sight anyway.I'm waiting to do anything much on it until my friends been round and taught me how to properly store documents etc...a big problem I have is that I open documents and save them somewhere...when I next go to look at them they're not where I thought so I have to download it again...I guess that ended up taking quite a bit of unnecessary space.

I'll look into this ccleaner thing.