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#11
Never buy an "All in one" system. That is like a black box. If something goes wrong, you cannot fix it. And you cannot upgrade it either.
And stay away from Pentium processors. That is an old technology. An i3, i5 or i7 would do very well for your type applications. A midrange graphics card is also good - no on-board graphics if possible. And 4GB of RAM would suffice for your applications.
As far as disk space is concerned I would be looking for 500GB minimum. But you can always supplement with an external disk. For the OS, I would later add a SSD. That will make the system a lot faster and will cost an extra $60 to $100.
Last edited by whs; 10 Nov 2012 at 21:09.