Inbox:When you want to buy a budget car, what do you look for? High performance? Probably not. Acceleration? I doubt it. You want to get from A to B and to negotiate the average road. The same applies to budget PCs, but can we shoe- horn the slick new Windows Vista operating system into a thrifty new vehicle?

Word is that Vista requires a higher than average PC specification to run well. It is complex and, in contrast to Windows XP's now familiar workaday appearance, it boats a slick interface reminiscent of the kind of thing to which Apple Mac users have become used over the years.

Microsoft recommends machines have at least 512Mb of Ram memory (although this is possibly optimistic), upwards of an 800Mhz processor and at least 15GB of hard disk space. All of these are achievable these days.

You'll also need to double check that a Vista PC will work with your existing peripherals such as your monitor, printer or scanner, as a handful of incompatibilities with older hardware remains. With all these considerations, I checked online what a budget of €400 would get me.

I started at online PC retailer Elara.ie. It offers a Fujitsu Siemens PC (€338.07) in the Esprimo Edition value line. This is a basic professional tower PC aimed at the price- conscious buyer.

The AMD-based P2411 is a professional-grade Vista PC which will run typical office applications. The Esprimo P2411 comes with an AMD Sempron 3600+/2 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM (which can be upgraded to 4 GB), an 80 GB hard drive, DVD drive and comes with Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic. However, a monitor is not included.

Since you are already likely to have a monitor from your old PC, so long as it is Vista compatible you may as well use it, thus saving some cash.

Dell Ireland (www.dell.ie) offers the InspironTM 531 starter base unit for a competitive €379 (which includes VAT & shipping).

This runs Windows Vista Home Basic on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core processor 3800+. Again no monitor is included and you are talking 512MB of Ram, but it has a more attractive 160GB hard drive and nVidia GeForce 6150 LE graphics card and DVD drive.

Finally, Lenovo Ireland (www.Lenovo.com/ ie) offers the Lenovo 3000 J115 Tower for €400 . This runs Windows Vista Home Basic on a AMD Sempron 3400+ 1.80GHz processor with a basic 512MB of RAM (or up to 2GB). It also comes with an nVidia GF 6100 Integrated Graphics card, an 80GB hard drive and CD-RW/ DVD-Rom combo drive.

So it is possible to get a budget Vista PC and enjoy the new operating system, especially if you hang on to your old monitor and keyboard for a little longer.