If you know nothing about computers...........

then buying a ready built one with a 3/5 year warranty is probably the way to go.

You need to accept that you will get 3-5 years of use from it for your money.

Forget about future upgrading as by that time you will probably want something much better and you will probably not want to keep any of the components.

Any computer that has dedicated graphics is probably going to be poor for high res gaming or applications.

I personally build all my own computers out of selected components, normally to do specific jobs.

I have some multimedia machines, servers and a personal workstation which runs 2 x 30inch (2560 x 1600) monitors

The major advantage I have is upgrading and the ability to fix components, meaning less down time.

Down time is worth more to me than the value of the computers.

The downside is I have to know what I am doing and the parts mostly have limited warranty, (except harddrives)

If you just use your computer for the web and downloading music then virtually any machine will do the job.

FWIW if you are using an XP machine with 4GB of ram (it will only see about (3.5)
The slowness is probably not down to the hardware.

More likley you need to make some adjustments.

My advice would be to follow the guide in this link

User Posted Link

If you follow most of the steps along with regular defrags I 100% guarantee your machine will run much faster.

Posted By: usacanary, Jul 26, 22:55:50