Desktops

Full towers, compact office boxes and all-in-ones:

what separates them is how much each one lets you change later. A full tower takes a full-length graphics card, extra drives and a bigger power supply for gaming or video work. The small-form-factor boxes offices favour sit neatly under a monitor but accept only low-profile cards, and their board and power supply rarely fit any other case. An all-in-one saves desk space, yet a cracked panel or a failed board takes the whole computer with it. Mini PCs and the Mac mini are close to sealed, so buy them with all the memory and storage they will ever need. A tower still needs a screen from monitors, and the RAM, SSD or graphics card for a later upgrade sits in computer components.

Shop-built towers, NSX boxes and the missing Windows licence:

a tower assembled from standard parts can be upgraded one piece at a time, which a branded office box rarely allows. The catch is the operating system. Many shop-built towers, and the FreeDOS versions of budget brands such as NSX, leave the shop with no Windows at all, so when two towers look alike on paper, find out which one carries an activated licence before you compare processors. A licence bought separately from software can turn the cheaper-looking box into the dearer one.

The Windows 11 line and what it does to a tower’s price:

it runs through the processor. Windows 11 will not install officially on most Intel chips older than the eighth generation or on first-generation Ryzen, and Windows 10 no longer gets regular security updates, so read the full processor name in a listing rather than just Core i5. A refurbished office tower that clears the line and runs on an SSD sits around Q3,500 to Q4,000, while an older box with a monitor thrown in can go for under Q2,000. It still handles spreadsheets, but on a system that no longer gets patched, and the price reflects that. On a new tower, the Windows licence accounts for roughly Q1,000 of the difference between a FreeDOS version and the same machine with Windows installed. A used gaming build is worth roughly what its graphics card is worth, so it follows the card’s generation rather than the processor’s.

A second-hand tower’s drive, cooler and power supply:

these give away how it was treated. Ask to see it running and open CrystalDiskInfo, which reads the drive’s own health rating and power-on hours. A box still on a spinning hard drive feels slow whatever its processor, though an SSD fixes that cheaply. With the side panel off, dust packed into the cooler fins means it ran hot. A power supply that clicks, buzzes or smells burnt is a reason to leave. On a gaming build, GPU-Z flags many cards reflashed to pose as a better model, and a game left running until the case is properly warm shows whether it crashes or throttles. On an all-in-one, a full white screen and then a full black one reveal dead pixels and backlight bleed.

A CPU listing that settles Windows and the monitor up front:

state which Windows version is installed and whether it is activated. Give the model from the case label or, for your own build, the processor, graphics card, RAM, storage and the wattage printed on the power supply, and photograph the open case and the System screen. Say whether the monitor, keyboard and mouse go with it, and wipe the drive and reinstall Windows before the handover. A buyer making the trip from Amatitlán or Santa Cruz del Quiché needs a screen and keyboard just to see a tower work, so keep a set plugged in and let them watch it boot to that freshly installed desktop.