Advice please - upgrade old pc or buy barebones?

[HappyH]

Got an old pc upstairs gets limited use but looks like useage will be increasing. With a budget of £200 I obviously ain't gonna get a gaming machine but not sure if it's worth upgrading or just buy a pre-built barebones (think that's what they're called?) desktop.
Spec. at the moment, according to Belarc Advisor is:
2.00 gigahertz AMD Athlon XP on a Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. GA-7DXE 1.x motherboard, with 1.25GB of ram (3 slots, 2x 512MB + a 256MB). Hard drives need replaced either way, two small capacity old IDE drives in at present.
System would be used for surfing, school projects & light gaming (a 10 year playing kids games really).
Any advice appreciated as always.
HH.

 

[BIG-HOL]

have a look at the acer revo net tops mate, cracking little pc's for the money, can be had relatively cheap these days, within budget anyway! also top notch as a media pc for playing hd movies and such!

 

[HappyH]

Thanks for the advice mate. Had a look at them there & they look sweet but not what I'm looking for. Gonna keep my eye on eBay for a while, see if I can pick up a bargain, something that if the wee fella gets into gaming as he gets older we could upgrade the graphics card, ram etc.
Cheers anyway,
HH.

 

[BIG-HOL]

have a look on ebuyer mate they do some decent specced towers at good prices! probably gone up abit with the price of hard drives these days!

 

[nistleboy]

For 200.00 if you could use your monitor,keyboard etc you could get a very decent gaming pc.

 

[HappyH]

For 200.00 if you could use your monitor,keyboard etc you could get a very decent gaming pc.

That's what I'd like ideally but can't find any examples, apart from used on eBay so if you can point me mate I'd appreciate it.
HH.

 

[little_pob]

To be honest that computer probably isn't worth upgrading. You can still get AGP graphics cards, but you are going to bottle neck on the CPU if you start trying to play too demanding games. Best to get a more up to date base unit that you can add to for the next couple of years:

Asus P6-M4A3000E Barebone | Ebuyer.com
AMD Athlon II X2 250 3.00GHz Socket AM3 2MB L2 Cache.. | Ebuyer.com
Kingston 2GB (2x1GB) DDR3 1600MHz HyperX Memory 1.65V.. | Ebuyer.com
Sony Optiarc DDU1681S 18x DVD-ROM SATA Optical Drive.. | Ebuyer.com
Total: £180.05 though you'd have to reuse the PATA hard drives in the old computer.

Alternatively going for this Asus V7-M4A3000E Vintage Barebone | Ebuyer.com barebones should allow you to pick up this hard disk: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Dig...1_5?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1320952219&sr=1-5 but will send you about £7 over budget.

The integrated graphics on both isn't going to set the world alight, but will be good enough for flash games.