Hi Guys

Im getting increasingly confused while looking around for a PC syste I can edit with. A little advice from you people in the know would be so helpful to me!

My budget is about £800. I want the pc for general usage (Internet and disc burning mainly) but also to edit film of no more than 10-20 mins long, which I will hopefully screen at short film festivals. I have a DV camcorder with DV out. I will be editing on Premiere.

Please dont get too technical on me...Im new to all this! I keep getting conflicting opinions, and I really hope I can clear it up here.

A few questions:

1) Bearing in mind my budget...should I buy or build(with help from a friend)?

2) I keep seeing very tempting offers from Tiny.com, like this one:

http://www.tiny.com/packages.php?prodid=10238

...are these any good? I was told today that they are unreliable, and that I should just get a Dell. Would you agree?

3) If someone could give me a simple list of "must have's" for a system, that would be great. What specs should I look for? ANy particular brands?

4) If I buy off the shelf....any recommendations?

5) Pentium or Athlon? Why? (please keep it very simple!)

Hope this isnt too much! Thanks a lot. You people are great

As far as I can see the Tiny PC you linked tohas everything you need.

I've had a PC from Tiny before now and never had a moments trouble with it. Still that was a widnows95, P133 with a whopping 32Mb of RAM which was cutting edge back then.

you have a camer with DV-OUT so all you need (hardware wise) for capture is a firewire port which it has.

The processor is more than capable and there is plenty of disc space.

Choose Pentium (whcih it hasd) over Athlon for video editing because of the hyper threading technology. Generally (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm talking nonsense) Athlon has more oomph per £ but for video editing the hyper threading takes over and wins the battle.

An 8x burner is about as good as you'll find.

We could examine particular MOBO and graphics cards all day long and there are plenty or people here more inthe know than I on these things, but as a general purpose box that will be used, amongst other things, for soem video editing that box will certainly do the trick.

Until very recently I've been using an Atliong 1800 with a gig and 2x60Gb drives and was getting along fine. At nearly three yeasr old it was starting toshow its age so I upgraded while I could afford it to somethign with spme real oomph!

Hope this helps.

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

thank you...that is very helpful advice