Hi,

My home PC is currently an old laptop, it's a 'HP Pavillion Entertainment PC' cool aye!
CPU-Z utility reports my setup as:

Intel Pentium T2130 / Yonah CPU, with 2 Cores and 2 Threads.
I've got 4GB of DDR2 memory and a Mobile Intel(R) 945 Express Chipset Family GPU

In the past this has been fine (ish!) for SD DV video editing using Premiere Pro.  Recently I've a need to edit some full HD AVCHD (is that it?) video files from a Sony Handycam and I've needed to update to a minimum of Premiere CS4 to be able to work with these files.  Not sure if it's the format or simply because it's full HD, but the laptop just can't keep up with this demand on it.

So, I'm going to have to upgrade one day anyway, but what's the general take on where I can go to fairly cheaply from here.  With kids, and one income now, I'm just not in a position to dump a cool $3,000 on a new rig, so I'm keen to get some ideas on what people would recommend here.

I'm probably looking at a 2nd hand desktop perhaps.  I'm not that worried about final output rendering times, as I tend to just leave it going overnight etc, but I do need something that can handle the real time previews etc a bit quicker with these files.  I'm keen on a bit of photography, lightroom mainly these days.  I don't use photoshop anywhere near as much as I used to since getting lightroom.

Screens, OS, keyboards/mouse etc is all obtainable, guess I'm talking cases, power supplies, mother boards, cpus, gpus and maybe a smaller SSD for the OS etc.  Anyone got any ideas on some package that might suit these needs?  Maybe even a small form factor prepackaged unit, any discussions welcome.

Cheers,
Jaxson.