$300-400 budget. I already have 2 gigs of DDR2 800mhz RAM which should be plenty. I also have an 8600GT laying around as well. Little to no gaming going on. Mainly just email/youtube. But I would prefer for it to be a dual core at least. Would like a case on the small side.
Just a thought...for $300, you can get a laptop that would do email, youtube, etc perfectly fine (a real laptop...not a netbook)...you just can't touch that price building it yourself, at least not after you pay for a screen and windows 7. Oh, and the case would certainly be on the small side.
I'd agree with KillerBug - if you have a monitor already lined up and you'd be willing to install Ubuntu or such, then you could build a reasonable dual core system for that.
He actually bought a laptop yesterday I guess this topic is moot now. It has what looks like a vga port on it so I guess I am going to put that $300-400 towards a monitor for it. He has the mind set that computers don't really do anything and it's the monitor that makes up the computer. Any time I go to frys with him he will always say "WOW LOOK AT THIS COMPUTER" and it's nothing but the apple cinema display. I was thinking of the 27 inch samsung maybe.
its usually people that know very little about computers that say stuff like that.its whats inside the box that counts.yeah a good moniter looks great but if the parts inside the box are not very good the computers not as good.
I'll just point out that $300-$400 on a decent monitor is a bit of a waste if the laptop only has VGA, as the image quality of VGA is far below that of DVI/HDMI and as a result, picture quality gains from buying a high-end monitor will probably be minimal.
