Desktop PC

I'm looking at getting a new desktop pc.

I've been looking around in the sales and been a little disappointed at what is on offer. So I am posting this here and seeing if people will respond with any information and advice on where to look to get a decent machine, and who to avoid.

I'm looking for something with a decent monitor, decent graphics card (At least 512mb) and at least 3Gb if not 4Gb of RAM. Hard Disk size is irrelevant as I will probably take the one out of my current machine and use that as a slave in the new PC too, plus I have a huge external drive that is almost empty. I also tend to prefer Pentium machines over AMD.

Any advice?

Thanks for all this info, I was actually looking at the Sony one as described on that PC Pro list, so it's good to readit comes well recommended.

At the moment though price reductions on machines that I'm interested in are a little hard to find, so I am hanging fire for the time being.

I was looking at a possible Mac, but I use pretty specific software for my work and a lot of my work databases are designed specifically for us. I am worried that if I port them over onto a Mac, a lot of the processes we need won't work.

What have your experiences been with the software?

Another thing that put me off was a course I went to recently which had a whole suite of Mac's but the engineer was cursing them saying how useless they were and that he could not wait until they were all changed back to PC's... I've no idea why, the one I used was fine it seemed to me.