Desktop PC refuses to boot up…Hard Drive error sounds fatal to me. It is pretty ancient so now faced with the decision…replacement Desktop or a second Laptop.
I like to mess with pictures sat infront of a large screen so another Desktop seem to make sense to me. Now into the snake-pit of finding one that fits my requirements at a reasonable price.
Recommendations for PCs please…
Well, where do you start?
Well first I should start with the disclaimer that I don’t do any photo editing so this reply is full of assumptions. But as I don’t play for a Premier League team and that hasn’t stopped me commenting on Saints, here goes…
Most modern consumer PCs with plenty of RAM will do a great job of basic photo editing. You really don’t need too many smarts for that.
However, if you do a lot of photo shizzle then perhaps the most important thing to get right is to get a true colour calibration on screen? Spend on the video card and monitor in that case. There is a type of monitor that is better (more expensive too) than others for that. Can’t remember what it is, will Google later.
A general recommendation would be to go for plenty of RAM and lots of storage - either all SSD - (although that is expensive) or hybrid SSD/mechanical. As a minimum, I’d have SSD for the operating system and swap space, and then a large mechanical drive for photo storage - and that large drive should be a hybrid SSD/mechanical.
If you do lots of batch processing of images that apply lots of filters to each image then CPU performance might become important, but if you apply piecemeal filters to individual images then a high-end consumer PC should be fine.
I’d also invest, if you haven’t already, in a large amount of in-cloud storage with automatic sync for the photo data. Don’t rely on having to upload stuff to Google/Apple. Oh, and go for a mix of USB (3/2) sockets and perhaps inbuilt SD card reader.
In-Plane Switching (IPS) is the type of monitor I was talking about. See here…
https://photographylife.com/what-is-ips-monitor
In fact this looks like a good article on selecting a spec for a photo PC.
Thanks for all that @saintbletch
Yes I have Onedrive cloud storage and carry all my picture files and documents off site so as not to clutter my hard drive .
I’m not into building my own and even after buying off the shelf I will probably get a geek in to install every thing and configure my network properly. It would probably take me all day and a geek a couple of hours at most.
My laptop has 8GB and runs much faster than my now defunct desktop for photo-editing so 16GB will do fine for the time being with expansion as a later option. My Desktop is backed up to a 3TB external drive as well as Onedrive so I should be back to normal (only infinitely faster) in a few days.
Looks a decent spec to me. Good processor, 16GB RAM, 2TB HDD and 128GB SSD for the O/S (as @saintbletch Bletch rightly suggested). Serious graphics capability too, so all in all that’s right up your street.
So 'slowlane has basically sabotaged his own photo PC so he can justify to Mrs 'slowlane his desire to buy a Bang & Olufsen speaker?
Bought. 
I can live with my current 22" monitor but will update to an IPS monitor shortly.