Buying a new desktop.

Looks fine, but they're really cheaping out on the cpu and hard drive to fit their $500 budget and still have a good graphics card. You could follow that, but stick a better processor in there and replace the hard drive with a 1 TB.

It is a TINY bit out of date, since this was before xmas, now you can get the 7850 for about $150 and maaaaybe squeeze in a SSD for $100 more and use an old hard drive from his current computer to store media.

As for CPU, I don't think he'll notice the difference unless he started doing lots of video encoding.