I NEED a new computer ...advice needed!

[ddt0725]

My daughter (IT student) has helped me out tremendously with giving my old computer a longer life expectancy but it is dying a painful death once again and it is time to put it and me out of our misery! It takes minutes to go from one computer screen to another, it takes hours to do very slight edits on a photo! I just loaded slightly over a hundred photos and it took about a 1/2 hour and it takes forever to open one photo!!! When I use photoshop I have to wait and wait and wait for the computer to catch up with me constantly! Now I can't even use the internet without a constant "not responding" message! I'm going crazy ...I am not a patient person to begin with!

#1 - I have not one penny at the moment to spend on a computer!
#2 - I have no choice but to sell my 100-400mm to get a new computer

My thoughts ...sell the 100-400mm and buy a used 200mm 2.8 II once again and use the rest of the money for a computer. When I have additional cash available, buy an extender for the 200mm to give me more reach. If that doesn't leave me with enough, then my longest lens will be 150mm I can take out of my current computer the additonal RAM, hard drive, graphics card that I just bought for it and put it in the new computer if need be. I could also take out Windows 7 Professional and put it on the new computer so it has to run 64-bit.

So, any thoughts on the best bang for my buck computer I can get or the cheapest place to buy one from or the main things I should look for?? I need to be able to load, edit and multi-task without growing older waiting for the computer to do it and what good is any of the photo equipment I have left if I don't have a computer.

Denise

FYI - I should mention up until 2 days ago, my computer was running perfectly, no problems! Why all of a sudden it has decided to go at such a super slow, barely moving pace I can't figure out!