So yeah
My friend wants a new desktop for around £300 (excluding OS).

He want's to be able to play games and have windows 7 (pro/ultimate).

£300 for the comp with graphics and OS may be pushing it. No chance if he needs screen and other peripherals.

Otherwise, you probably want to look at going AMD/ATi.

£300 for PC, then he will buy the OS.

£300 for the whole pc? I could recommend a few things, but the best would be buying everything that is pretty good and underpower it with a poor £20 CPU in the chance that he can upgrade the CPU within 1-2 months.

But he may be best going amd, then going with something as epitomal as the 8800gt (9800gt) and keep it going for a year.

Depends on what he wants to be able to do with it.
If he already has a keyboard, mouse and monitor, things become better.

Hmm, I was thinking it should be possible, but just checked prices on stuff, and things (especially memory) have gone up since I last checked.

Extending the budget by £100 would make it quite easy to do, though.

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Would make this extremely easy, but requires that you (harry) or your friend knows what you are doing.


I may also be able to help myself, 2 gigs of 1066mhz ram DDR2 (alot cheaper then you can find it on the web). Perhaps my 4890, needs me some moar powa.

Ah, second hand kit, that would make it easy, but also quite dodgy at times

Well, my friend said around £500 at most.
I think he already has mouse etc, and just wants the "tower".

So it's pretty much just a £300 case and a few old bits of hardware

£500 is easy, just do some research into mid-range hardware.