answer:I’d recommend something like an eMachines ET1831–07. It’s a desktop that comes with a dual-core 2.7 GHz Pentium processor. 4 GB of ram. And 650 GB hard drive. Not a heavy hitter by today’s standards, but plenty capable of photo editing and light gaming. When you turn it on, you’re at the Windows 7 desktop in a matter of seconds. I’m really impressed by that! It runs MS Train Simulator without lag, which speaks well for the machine as a gaming machine. The base machine is about $350, but I sprung for a wide-screen monitor and external 1.5 TB hard drive which put my bill at a little over $600. I love laptops too, but all things being equal you’re going to pay more for a laptop than a desktop due to the extra complexity for miniaturisation of everything. Until last weekend, my old HP laptop ran XP, which was physically painful to use. I converted it to Ubuntu after I got my new machine set up.