Is this desktop any good?

[Markeh]

Looking at an Elite Essential PC from MESH, with a few additions. Is it any good for doing coursework, iTunes and the odd bit of iPlayer? I'm not really able to spend more money on it though.

System Base Price: £ 225.22
Intel® Pentium™ Dual Core™ E5300 Processor(2.6GHz,2MB Cache,800MHz)
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium Edition - 64bit English [upg £ 75.00]
New Stylish Mini-Tower Micro ATX Chassis with 550W PSU - Piano Black [upg £ 20.00]
ASUS P5QPL-AM Mainboard - Intel Core™ 2 Duo/Quad Core MATX
4GB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM - (2x 2GB)
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer
22x Dual Layer DVD Writer Super Format +R/-R/RW/RAM
512MB ATI Radeon HD4350 (Direct X10.1, PCI Express 2.0) - PC Pro Best Value [upg £ 27.00]
Multi-Format Memory Card Reader -(52-in-1 Internal) [upg £ 10.00]
5.1 High Definition onboard sound card - 6 Channel Cinema sound
1 Year Free Hardware Warranty - Return to Base Parts and Labour (UK Mainland only)

http://www.meshcomputers.com/Skins/MeshShop_vII/images/1x1.gif
Any suggestions as to whether this is good?

[Chippiewill]

That'll be fine, tbh unless you start gaming you don't need that much RAM or such a powerful GFX Card

[N!ck]

Yes, will be decent for doing those things.

[StefanWolves]

It'll rape the stuff you need to do, put it that way.

[LOLROB]

Where from post the URL's :P

I do like the look of this

[StefanWolves]

Same. I'm tempted.

[N!ck]

It's not that amazing at £357.

[GommeInc]

http://www.meshcomputers.com

Mesh are genuinely okay, but they are terrible for customer services. But think of it this way, for that price it's not that bad and no-one ever needs to talk to the companies - fixes are usually found for free on the internet :P

Medion are another good company, they used to sell their desktops in places like Tescos for £500. For that you would get a blu-ray player, 1TB HDD, a decent graphics card, Core 2 Quad CPU and 3 or 4GB memory. Whether they still sell computers for this cheap is another question though :/

[Markeh]

If I remember, Medion PCs are available in Aldi...

I'd be possibly using the PC for a little gaming (GTA4, maybe The Sims 3), so thats why I specified a half-decent graphics card, which in addition is why I specified the 550w PSU (futureproofing just incase I decide to upgrade it later on)

I shall see if I can scrape enough money together...

[AgnesIO]

Processor is a bit of a let down imo.

[BeanEgg]

Wow! That's a good spec and price!

Are they trusted and reliable?

[Chippiewill]

I'd be possibly using the PC for a little gaming (GTA4, maybe The Sims 3)

Let's put it this way, GTA4 will rape YOUR machine, the PC version is a REALLY bad port. Even on my computer it's slow and generally laggy and I'm running a 6 month old 2k machine. GTA4 will be really slow on your machine and settings also very low.

[Markeh]

I'm not wasting £1k on a decent enough machine to play GTA4 when it costs less than that for a PS3 or 360 and a copy.

Anyway, I've decided against buying the PC, as my dv6 is good enough at the moment, and I'd rather spend the money on some new bedroom furniture :D