Video: £250 challenge on the High Street

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

While my colleagues were comfortably ensconsed in front of their computers for the £250 challenge, I had to get off my bum and do some good old-fashioned legwork. Here’s what happened. You can read more about the laptop itself here. (more…)

My pre-built PC: The final shortlist

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

I’ve trawled the internet for bargains, customised more online PCs than I can count and consistently found the same few components to be most suited to my £250 price limit. I’m now left with the final decision: from a shortlist of three, which system offers the best return for my budget?

Option 1:

Asus’s little Eee Box PC is limited in its everyday functions due to the Atom inside, and on the optical front it doesn’t even stretch to a CD-ROM drive, but it does have its merits. For a start it’s tiny, quiet and consumes little power when on. It looks good, will fit snugly into any nook or cranny of a desk, and the cheapest I could find it in stock was £245.94 including VAT and delivery – within my budget.

• 1.6GHz Atom N270, 1GB DDR2
• 160GB hard disk
• Windows XP Home

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The man who should replace Steve Jobs at Apple

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Whether Steve Jobs really does only need to get his hormones back in balance, or there’s something more serious going on, Apple are going to need to find a new top dog at some juncture.

For me, there’s one outstanding candidate for the job and (whisper it) he comes from the old enemy: Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky.

Sinofsky’s performed not one, but two minor miracles at Microsoft. He was the man responsible for the magnificent overhaul of the Office suite, with Office 2007. Microsoft was so scared of tampering with the Office cash cow that the software had barely changed in appearance since the days of Windows 3.1. Redesigning the interface on a piece of software that is used by the vast majority of office and homes around the world was fraught with risk, but Sinofsky and his team pulled it off with care and no small amount of style. Now not only is it immeasurably easier to produce professional-looking documents in Word, for example, but fast-gaining open-source rivals such as OpenOffice now look tired by comparison.

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Zero Hour approaches for my £250 build

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Myself and several of my colleagues are currently taking part in a unique challenge – buying or building a PC for £250 and discovering whether the high street, the internet or building the machine yourself yields the best results.

I’d had thoughts of building a media centre machine, but that plan is, at this point, dead in the water. To get that build into budget I found myself cutting too many corners: reducing the size of the hard disk, settling for an even worse chassis and not being able to include wireless internet, for instance, felt like removing too many crucial features to make it worthwhile.

So, that means my machine will be a good old-fashioned desktop PC, albeit one without a monitor or speakers. My final shopping list has been tweaked, pennies have been shaved off prices, and I’ve spent most of the week calculating delivery charges to work out if I save money by ordering from one site or if I’d be ruined by City Link.

My list of specifications is now complete, though, so you have until early afternoon to try and dissuade me from making a terrible mistake:

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The spec creeps slowly upwards

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

It took mere hours for my baseline Vostro PC to be bettered, thanks in no small part to blog reader Tom A pointing me in the direction of Ebuyer’s pre-built PC section. There, for a penny-perfect £249.99 inc VAT and delivery, sat the Zoostorm Versatile Premium PC which now tops my shortlist.

The specs improve on the Vostro: (more…)

London, a shop, a £250 computer and me.

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

So I’m in a battle with my colleagues Mike Jennings and David Bayon. I’ve somehow to come up with a PC that beats both of their efforts for no more than £250 inc VAT. But I’m restricted to buying mine directly from one of the shops lining both sides of Tottenham Court Road in London, between the junction at Oxford St and Goodge St Tube.

I am confident of success. For lo! I have a secret weapon. (more…)

Help me build the Goodwill PC

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

Here’s a poser for you… if building a PC for a mere £250 is a challenge (hence the name of the feature) then what is building a PC for absolutely nothing? A labour? A punishment? The wrath of Tim? Whatever it is, I’m going to give it a bash.

Thankfully, I have a couple of weapons at my disposal. The first is an almost alarming lack of dignity that means going cap in hand into the world isn’t going to faze me at all. Couple that with a distinct lack of common sense or taste and you’ve a formidable begging combination. However, my most important weapon is you… I desperately need your help. I need to find legitimate sources of free computing stuff: groups, organisations, tips, anything that will net me something completely free that I can stuff into a case (though I’ll be needing a case, too, thinking of it). Bear in mind, I’m not soliciting free stuff from you. I need to go through the everyday, normal channels that anybody could use if they wanted to do the same thing.

God only knows why I was chosen for this particular task, maybe it was my Ringo Starr accent, or my dress sense which has something of the homeless chic to it I admit, but I absolutely refuse to lose out to my comparatively loaded colleagues.

Goodwill is a powerful thing, and people are generally brilliant if given half a chance. Now let’s see if together they’re powerful enough to build a PC from scratch.

The real reason to buy Windows 7

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

For the past decade I’ve been disappointed with every Windows release, opening up the standard applications like Notepad with childish anticipation, only to discover that – yet again – they haven’t improved. With the WIndows 7 beta people seem to be going loopy over the new Office Ribbon look of Wordpad and Paint, while overlooking the fact that they do precisely nothing the old versions couldn’t do. No word count in Wordpad; no new editing tools in Paint. Okay, Wordpad can now cope with OOXML files but that doesn’t count as a new feature in my book.

But wait, what’s that riding boldly over the crest of the application-shaped hill? (more…)

How best to spend my £250?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

A blog comment from Sharpey made me think last night – every thought about my £250 PC has so far centred on a standard desktop machine. So why not ditch that and build a media centre instead?

The benefits seem numerous. Since the PC would be connected to a TV, I don’t have to bother with a monitor or speakers – which instantly frees almost £70 from my budget – and the motherboard I’d already picked out is mATX anyway, and so will fit into most of the cases I spent last night gazing at. It would also be full of Blu-ray technology to make movies look fantastic.

So, here’s my current shopping list:

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Vostro does the business. But where next?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

Turns out yesterday’s fruitless visit to Dell wasn’t quite complete – I had only considered Dell’s consumer offerings. A quick jump to the business section took me straight to Dell’s cheapest Vostro PC, which at £211.60 including VAT and delivery is well within my price limit. So what else can I squeeze into the remaining £38.40?

It’s built around a Pentium Dual-Core E2200, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard disk and integrated graphics. My choices for affordable upgrades are:

• Vista Home Premium – add £20+VAT
• 2GB RAM – add £10+VAT
• from DVD-ROM to DVD-RW drive – add £20+VAT

As useful as it would be, I draw the line at paying more than £20 to upgrade to a DVD writer, so with the first two upgrades selected my new baseline system comes to £246.10 inc VAT and delivery.

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