Budget - $1,000 tops, but under is always good.
Resolution - 1080p I guess? No gaming involved, and I don't think 4K is going to be in her price range
Games / Settings Desired - None
Any other intensive software or special things you do (Frequent video encoding, 3D modeling, etc) - Photoshop
Country - USA (microcenter nearby)
Do you need an OS? Yes
Do you need peripherals (e.g. monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc)? Monitor yes, the rest no.
My mom is need of a new computer, and I'd like to help her out by putting it together for her. She's a part-time/hobbyist photographer but only stills, no video editing or anything more than photoshop. From a bit of research it looks like photoshop doesn't take much gpu power so it would probably be able to be covered by a chip that has an integrated gpu or a cheap stand-alone card, is that correct? Other than her photos, she just uses it for general web browsing and light computer activities, no gaming or anything else.
Case is going to be tucked away under an end table, so form factor or aesthetics don't matter at all. She has a few external hdds that she backs up the majority of her pictures on, but she's about 700Gbs into the 1 TB hdd in her current laptop so I figure a 2TB hdd to go along with an SSD would be more than enough for the future.
I don't know a lot about monitors in general, but even less about what would be useful features in a monitor for someone doing photo editing.