Hi all,
———————2/29/16 EDIT———————-
Ok here is the update as requested. In the end I actually ended up with a much better pc than I would have found on my own, and came in *under *budget!
Here is the PC I started with.
HP Compaq 6200
I5-2400 3.1g processor
8g Ram
500g HDD
And it came with an Nvida Quadro graphics card to boot. Price was $185 shipped.
I then added this 250g Samsung SSD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147372
This adapter
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994159&cm_re=2.5_3.5_adapter-*~~17-994-159~~*-Product
I’m not sure if that was exactly the right adapter for my tower, but I was able to make it work
I also had to purchase a SataIII cable which I got form newegg (lost the link) and a DVI monitor cable.
The results:
A land slide of better performance vs my old pc! This computer on its own easily runs twice as fast than my old one. Starts up quicker, and belive it or not even gave me like a 20% faster shuffle on the internet ( I have only 1.5m available where I live so every bit helps)
Not only that even with the purchase of the SSD I still came in around $100 under budget. About $287 total. The SSD was simple to install and came with a disc that will automatically copy my old hard drive and OS to the new drive. Once that was done all I had to do was go to bios (restart F10) and change the boot order.
One last added bonus I noticed was that this pc has 2x 4g sticks or ram installed and 4 slots total so an upgrade to 16g will be easy if I ever need it.
Thank you all so very much for helping be to do far better than I could have on my own!
———-OP below here———
Its that time again. I need a new desktop computer for the business/shop. Really just looking for the tower mostly. I have a monitor, its the old square style but its a flat screen so it will do.
I guess the place to start is with my budget. It needs to be under $400 shipped.
I have some idea what I want, but my biggest hang up probly is not knowing enough about the processors. For example is a 6th generation i5 better than a 2nd generation i7?
Here are my top contenders for the moment, but if you have a totally different idea please chime in.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883283078
This one has only a 500g hard drive vs the 1T, but its a dell ( I have had much better luck with dell vs HP in the past)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/MICOMP-Dell-990-Tower-Desktop-Computer-PC-Core-i7-Quad-3-4Ghz-8GB-500GB-Win-7-64-/271953742896?hash=item3f51b4cc30:g:y68AAOSw—1Wr5a4
And finally I saw this. Cheaper but has only the i5 processor, but its a 6th gen.
Again if you have a better solution than any of those three I am all ears.
Thanks in advance.