I purchased a time computer just before they closed the purchase price was around £1000
it was a tower unit. this competer has been destroyed in a fire and the insurance company want an idea of its configueration. can you help

I should be able to do so. However I need from you either the product code or model number
Both should be on the back of the machine on the makers plate, while the product code will also be on the invoice

But the invoice may be lost and the makers plate burned beyond recognition. £1000 seems a lot to pay for a computer five years ago. But even the cheapest modern desktop should outperform a five-year-old computer. So I would suggest that the configuration doesn't matter if you have a new-for-old insurance policy.

the £1000 will probably have included printer / scanner / webcam / monitor and possibly an extended warranty
If you assume £250 for the warranty, £120 for the monitor, £50 each for printer and scanner, £30 for the 'free' software bundle the price soon begins to drop to a more realistic level of around £500 for the base unit
What would you have got for that?
Well by then Time were not able to get AMD processors, so it was probably an early P4 dual core CPU. Driver downloads for windows 7. Typically for a machine in that value range there would be 512GB RAM, an ATi Radeon 9600 card (either 128 or 256MB) 200GB hard drive and maybe a TV tuner. The motherboard itself would be almost anything we could get hold of. There would be a DVD writer
Time tended not to use Windows Media Centre - instead machines were setup with XP Home or Pro and then used either the ATi media centre or other 3rd party TV software - eg Cyberlink or FunTV. A very few were supplied with Windows Media Centre -these tended to be small all-in-one units from ECS.
I can't really offer much more without details from the invoice. But it is fair to say that almost any multicore machine purchased now would exceed the specifications

5 years ago, it would have been a pentium 4 with 3.2ghz processor speed and 512mb memory with 80gb hard drive.
time pcs never did super pcs even at the time, they mostly did computers for home and office use.
they've gone bankrupt a long time ago.
for inssurance, my clients bring them to me for an issurance report and how much it cost to repair then I would declare it beyong repair and recommend a new computer.

no you're wrong: we were moving on to bigger drives and dual core processors by then for machines in this price range. You're suffering from the oft-repeated incorrect wisdom about Time, who despite the reputation DID sell some decent spec machines