New desktop tower

[Whoaru99]

Looking for a basic, albeit decent desktop tower for replacement over at my GFs place.

Costco has a Gateway (i5-4440 processor) Win 8.1, 4GB RAM, DVD RW, 1TB 7200 HDD, has USB 3.0, wireless and wired LAN, Bluetooth, wireless KB and mouse, etc. etc.

Price is $350. Seems reasonable, yeah?

[delcecchi]

Looking for a basic, albeit decent desktop tower for replacement over at my GFs place.

Costco has a Gateway (i5-4440 processor) Win 8.1, 4GB RAM, DVD RW, 1TB 7200 HDD, has USB 3.0, wireless and wired LAN, Bluetooth, wireless KB and mouse, etc. etc.

Price is $350. Seems reasonable, yeah?

Yes it does. Adding more memory is cheap, should you need it. 4G should do the job, although I have no experience with Windows 8.

[upnorth]

If it has shared memory for the video card I would think about upgrading to 8 gig. But like Del said not a pricey upgrade.

[Sandmannd]

What's the max RAM it can handle? I always like to max that out if you can afford to. I believe RAM is cheap now so would upgrade that.

[BartmanMN]

Windows 8.1 is good. I run it at home without issues.

[Whoaru99]

What's the max RAM it can handle? I always like to max that out if you can afford to. I believe RAM is cheap now so would upgrade that.

32GB, I believe. Can't see needing that much for general purpose computering...mostly web surfing and forum posting.

Not like I'm doing a bunch of photo editing or having many windows/apps open at one time.

[Iowa_Josh]

If you're just using the web, buy a chrome box instead. I have two chrome books and they have been stellar.

[upnorth]

I think in most cases 4 is OK, but if you are like me with a pile of windows and tabs always open for convenience sake I would bump it to 8 gig.

[delcecchi]

I have two boxes running win 7. One is a laptop with i3 and 4 gigs. The other is a desktop with i5 and 6 gigs. They both perform satisfactorily. I have never had a situation where I noticed things radically slowing down, like they do if running out of real memory and starting to page.