OK, well I won't be buying a shitty Fujitsu-Siemens again - I got this current one reasonably priced at the end of last year (November time) and just over a year later it's struggling - 3 of the keys have fallen off and every time I play poker (for some reason, nothing else, just when I load up a few poker clients, who knows why???) every so often it freezes - I mean totally freezes, it does not respond to any buttons or mouse movements, and the screen stops dead (including anything that was animated - it just totally freezes like a picture). I then have to manually reboot the computer by pressing the power button. It was only occasional at first but now it happens routinely when I run poker sites (Crypto, Pacific and Party are probably the common denominators).

Anyhow, slightly pissed off at having to replace my PC barely a year after shelling out money for this one, I'm looking for something cheap that does the job.

Requirements:

1) Reasonable processing power/speed, though I don't run much other than poker on it (I have some games but I rarely play them and I'm not too concerned about gaming really) but something vaguely future-proof would be good.

2) A big screen. This is a must for poker, ideally a 17" widescreen would be good; now I have a 15.4" wide one I think but it doesn't quite give me as much space as I'd like.

3) I guess I'd like to have a DVD player (though not essential) and obviously a CD writer. I think these are basically standard now anyways. Oh, USBs too, though again, standard I guess...

4) As cheap as possible. I really don't want to part with a ton of cash for a PC to basically play poker on. Microsoft Office bundled would be handy too as I don't have it (not essential). Ideally I'd want to get something for maybe £700 or so, maybe even less if possible. It's not that I can't afford more, I basically begrudge it for all the use I'd get out of a high-end system....

Stuff I don't care about:
1) Make/model
2) Other random crap bundled with it
3) Graphics/sound capabilities not too much of a concern. I'd like to be able to run some games but nothing mega high-end and it's not really a priority anyhow.

Ideally brit-based, obviously. Hit me!

What about this? http://www.comet.co.uk/cometbrowse/prod ... sku=362964

Oh it has a smaller screen than the website said. Nvm.

Defragment disk maybe? Formatting could help

Monk, I'd check with the manufacturer to see if there are any BIOS updates or other updates for your model. I'd also look around for some free hardware diagnosis tools -- memtest86 is a good one for memory.