My dear old PC has finally given up and self-destructed. She's been on her last legs for a while now and had a good run...

...anyway, I'm now in the market for a new PC. It's been 5 years since I last looked at the hardware side so I don't know what equipment is good and what isn't, especially for my requirements and budget.

I can salvage the monitor, keyboard, mouse, FDD, Optical drives and a few other peripherals from my old PC but I'll need everything else.

My budget is £500-£800 and for that I need a PC that will run resource-intensive programs like the Adobe Creative Suite (most important requirement) and can play recent PC games at a reasonable quality (doesn't have to be brilliant 3D graphics), ok sound and a good CPU. Plus a wireless card and a case with a decent number of slots to put them all in, fan, power supply, HDD etc...

What spec would you recommend for me?

Also is it possible to install an old HDD into a new computer?

And will I need a new copy of XP or can I reinstall it using the product key that is on the case on my old computer? I pretty sure I've still got the installation disk lying around somewhere.

With £500 to £800 you could get a laptop that's capable of doing all you want, to be honest. Just make sure it's got decent graphics for the games (nvidia or ati really, the intel onboard stuff is getting better but still not really ideal for gaming). You'll find that CPU, RAM and hard drive space is more than ample no matter what you get.

Same goes for a desktop really - it depends if you want to build your own or get a readymade, either way make sure you get a half decent ati or nvidia graphics card.

You can put old HDDs in another PC (or get one of those handy USB dongles that will turn any hard drive into an external USB) but they'll probably be IDE and all the new motherboards only tend to have one IDE port, generally for the CD/DVD drive so you'll probably be better getting a large hard drive in the machine you buy and copying what you want off your old drives onto that.

Finally, yeah you should be fine using an old XP serial from your other box but again if you buy a readymade it'll come with windows on already (probably vista though).

Hope that helps,

OK, my recommendations:
Provision a decent amount of cash (£80-100) on case and power supply, these two things directly affect the longevity of your next build.
www.quietpc.com have some great cases with sound proofing etc. for sub £70.
Power supply wise I've found the OCZ power supplys are great, theres one branded StealthXStream, its quiet, runs to proper voltages, and is fairly reasonable. Available in 500w and 600w forms.

Motherboard should be from one of the big 3; Asustek, Gigabyte, MSI(?) Althouth MSI have had bad reputations in the past their recent batches of mid-high end boards have been great. Spend ~£70 on a decent one. You'll be wanting either the Intel P35 chipset, or the nVidia 650i; I'd go for the Intel P35 personally.

Processor, allow anywhere up to £150 for this. I'd say especially if you're sticking with XP, don't bother with a quadcore, a 1333mhz FSB dual core will be cool, quiet, and blazingly fast. i.e: Intel E8400 is ~£120, go with something like that.

Splash out on some FAST RAM, 4gb of slow RAM is going to reap less benefits than 2gb of good quality fast RAM. Stick with OCZ range, Crucial Ballistix, or Corsair XMS2. Anything else is essentially inferior.

Video card; Something like an ATI Radeon HD3870 would be a good choice, or a Geforce 8xxx or 9xxx card. I'd recommend not spending more than £120 or so on a gfx card if you're not bothered about the newest and fastest games. This system will still be able to handly most things you can throw at it, at reasonable settings.

HDDs are dirt cheap these days, and run over the SATA interface, so I'd recommend to keep your experience fast, scrap the old one and buy ~320gb 7200RPM hard drive from a reliable/respected manufacturer, that won't set you back by much more than £50 and will provide you with plenty of room for manouvre.

As for keyboard, mouse, monitor. It is these three things that are primary to your experience as a computer user, I'd recommend investing in a new keyboard, an optical mouse with a high DPI resolution (especially with regards to using Adobe Creative Suite), and 20"+ monitors can be picked up for ~£100-£150 these days.

You can use your current product key for XP, installing from any disk, so don't worry about that.

Hope that helps, anyway! If you need any more help/info just drop us a PM.

EDIT:
As for places to pick these up on budget, each site will have certain things available at a better price than others, but I've found DABS to be overall the cheapest; they also do free 5 day delivery on orders over £100

For references sake, worthwhile online computer shops (and I've used a LOT of them in my time)
www.dabs.com
www.ebuyer.com (after sales support/customer service used to be abysmal, but I've heard some good things about them recently)
www.ginger6.com has the occasional bargain and free delivery on certain items
www.quietpc.com for cases etc.

I'd like to add http://www.aria.co.uk and http://www.scan.co.uk to the above list of sites. I find them cheaper than most and also aria especially has fantastic customer service.

Thanks for the advice. I'll start looking into all the suggestions you made.