What is the best cheap replacement for a desktop running Windows Vista?

Windows Vista reaches the end of its life on 11 April. John wants to buy a new PC to replace his slow 10-year-old Acer Aspire.

I have a 10-year-old Acer Aspire T660 desktop with 640MB of memory and Windows Vista Premium installed. The whole system is getting slower and slower, including the instruction to print documents and/or photos to my HP printer/copier/scanner.

I use the PC for email, online banking, word processing and spreadsheets (Microsoft Office), Skype and some games. Broadband here to the house is poor.

You must have an enormous amount of patience to run Windows Vista in 640MB or even 2GB of memory, and your best investment would have been to add as much memory as your PC could handle - in this case, 4GB. Sadly, it's too late for that: it's not worth spending money on a machine that is at the end of its useful life. On the plus side, almost anything will be a huge improvement.