vista machine

[bork[e]]

Mustard up some spare change over the past few weeks I'm going to put towards building a cheap machine to run vista on. Nothing special at all, main programs will be IE and Office 2007 suite.

Budget is no more than $800. If someone has the spare time it would be nice to have some more experience in helping me put together the best machine for that small price tag.

btw, that price includes a monitor and hopefully a printer.

I've been clicking around newegg and the like for far longer than I wanted to now and haven't found a match I'm happy with yet.

[Foo]

You could virtualise vista on your current PC?

[bork[e]]

I would like to keep it on a seperate machine away from my current one.

I was going to use this one at first, but I would like a completely diff. machine for this.

[Nightshade]

Mustered, you maron.

[AmIdYfReAk]

what are you looking for in this PC? and i take its USD.

Do you have the copy of Vista?

[Foo]

I would like to keep it on a seperate machine away from my current one.

I was going to use this one at first, but I would like a completely diff. machine for this.

Fair enough but virtualising it would completely isolate it from the rest of the stuff on your PC. I'd encourage you to try it if you've never tried virtualising an OS before, it's very easy to do.

On the other hand there are a few reasons you might need a whole separate PC so fair enough. If you understand virtualisation and don't think it's appropriate, I understand.

[obsidian]

If you don't have Vista, you might want to just pick up whatever $800 prebuilt system package you can get of a decent brand.

If you already have a copy you should be able to pick up an AMD X2 these days for that price range. DDR2 memory is ridiculously cheap so 1-2 GB.

[Dr_Watson]

buy an ass load of ram and a giant hard disk, you'll need both.

[Scourge]

I get by just fine with 1.5g. and the OS isn't really that large compared to previous OS size increases. Win 3.1 was around 3mb, 95 around 50 mb, 98se a couple hundred mb, XP 2 to 3 gigs. My Vista install is sitting at 13.5 gigs.

[Captain]

Win98SE was about 500MB IIRC.

[Foo]

300 and a bit depending on options yeah.

[StarShrieker]

I'm also looking at a Vista machine for around the same price (maybe increase that up to $900 at the most), but I'm looking for a cheap, decent gaming machine.

I've been shopping around, and actually have been finding decent pre-built rigs for that price.

In both of our cases, with the number of companies out there doing it, is pre-built an okay route to go? I've found systems with 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM, Geforce 8500 and 8600 gpus, and 500W PSUs, etc. I really haven't researched mainboards but I'm not real worried about that either.