Thank you for all your contributions. I've also read through this other current thread
here.
Whilst I've known for some time (ever since I bought a new E-IDE 160GB hard disk 3 or 4 years ago and first came across the term SATA, then had to replace my dead graphics card a few months ago with a dusty old generic AGP card supporting 1 monitor only - all I could find on a Saturday morning, which cost €25 at the local PC shop...), that I would have to eventually replace my 10 year old DELL PC, the lack of
continued Microsoft support was what most worries me. My last DELL PC cost me €1500 (came with XP Pro) back in 2003. Before that, it was another DELL, bought in 1997 with Office SBE. In between though, I also received a gift "for services rendered" to Microsoft's Paul Allen and his yacht MEDUSE in the form of a retail pack of MS Office 2000.
Everything
works for me today: DELL PC / XP PRO SP3 / OFFICE 2000 / IE8 / OUTLOOK EXPRESS 6 etc. and if there's one thing I've learned about IT - if it works, then don't touch it?! OK, fewer websites are willing to ensure that their sites are 100% compatible with IE8, but otherwise...?
The GOOD NEWS is that though my last DELL cost me €1500, it appears that I could currently buy a OPTIPLEX 3020 with INTEL i3-4130 4th generation 3.4GHz / 3MB dual-core processor with integrated graphics card / 500GB hard disk, supplied with Windows 7 PRO (with Windows 8 64bit OS license - whatever that means) for €349 + VAT (without monitor or delivery charges). MS OFFICE 2013 (Family - SBE) available for €199 extra (I need Word and Excel). So the financial cost is not so great a "shock" as what I thought it might be.
What
I do not look forward to especially is spending several days
at least learning about and configuring the new PC / OS etc. to work "just how I'd like it to", transferring all the data from the old PC to the new PC (presumably would not be able to install the old E-IDE hard disks to the new PC?), then trying to re-install my favourite (and paid-for) programs accumulated over the years which worked on XP PRO...
2 last questions for the sages here though:
1) Would it make more sense to spend a few hundred € more than the DELL hardware above? I don't do any video-editing etc., but my 10 year old DELL was the "bee's knees" when I originally bought it, just in case I meet any Fort Bragg types...
2) Concerning Windows 7 PRO, was that a reliable OS? Apparently the DELL PC would come with that as standard together with "a Windows 8 64 bits" license. Would that allow me to upgrade to Windows 8.1 (and would I want to)?