Looking to buy new desktop - need help

[aislephive]

Basically I'm looking for something that is pretty fast. Right now I have pahud up when playing and it takes forever to load stats on the tables, 6th sense takes forever, I frequently have the computer lock up for a few seconds while playing. When I'm playing a session (Party Poker) my cpu usage stays around 80-90% or something ridiculous.

I have a couple movie files stored on the computer which is an XP and it's a few years old, but there isn't much on it right now. I'm just looking for a good desktop for poker and would like to be pointed in the right direction. I do a lot of heavy datamining but that's pretty much it. I'm looking to spend anywhere from $500-1k. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[wheel son]

desktops are pretty cheap now, i dont know how computer inclined you are but you could build your own system that is balls to the wall for 6-700.. anyway u probably want around 2-3 ghz processor, core duo if you want intel, or AMD.. 1-2 gigs of ram, heavy datamining im not sure how much memory it takes up but 200 gig hard drives are is pretty big... video card is not that big a deal if your jus watching movies and playin poker all you need is a nice 128mb video card, ati or nvidia... that has a high resolution setting(if you are multi tabling) dvd burners are pretty standard now... and 19" screen, as for brands, dell does make cheap stuff, hp is probably your best bet although there are other good brands.. hope this helps at all building a PC is pretty easy by the way.. let me know if you have any questions.

[King Spew]

Just out of curiosity.... what is you RAM size now? 256K? 512K?

If you are under 1G, you may consider upgrading memory b4 spending $$$ on a new system.

[holyfield5]

I just build a pretty high end system for 600(owned 2 monitors already)

you can get a nice guide on pcmech but the instructions that come with the parts can walk you through the build.

you are probably having problems with your current system because of malware.