Because on pages 102-9 of issue 175 you’ll find complete specs for each of the five PCs in the challenge, along with the sorry tales of how we obtained them. You’ll also find an assessment of how well we all fared, in the judgment of our estimable editor, Mr Tim Danton.

But screw him; because the real judge, dear readers, is your good selves. Yes, ultimately it’s down to you to decide who wins the challenge. Will it be David Fearon, proud purchaser of the world’s most mediocre laptop? Seriously, they should call it the Acer Uninspired. Ha ha.

Or will you vote for Bayon, who didn’t even bother to choose his own PC? He just whinged about it in his blog until a kind reader went and found a suitable system for him. And, oops, he forgot to order a monitor, so here’s hoping he doesn’t want to, you know, see anything.

Perhaps you’ll vote for Stuart. His tale of goodwill does tend to renew one’s faith in human nature. Unfortunately, when you look at the PC he ended up with, it’s really not much of a gift. It’s one of those immense Compaq DeskPro systems from the turn of the millennium that occupies an entire desk and churns along at about two FLOPS. It might be fine if you just want to dash off a quick document in WordPerfect, or dial in to CompuServe; but it’s not much use if you actually want to party like it’s 2009.

Or, of course, you could vote for Mike’s… creation. You could. I mean, sure, it’s ugly. And noisy. And the front USB and audio ports don’t work. And there’s no monitor. And there’s not even a proper OS – just a Windows 7 beta that expires in August. Then again, given Jennings’ maniacal overclocking I don’t suppose his PC will last that long anyway.

But still, you could vote for Mike. Don’t let me stop you.

Ultimately, though, as all true Englishmen know, there’s only one winner: my glorious Compaq Presario. Sure, I had to go through some eBay shenanigans to buy it. Nothing worth the winning is achieved without effort.

But now I have a fast, fully-featured PC system. It boasts a full 2GB of RAM, a monitor, discrete graphics, speakers and even an all-in-one printer. It can run Vista without a hiccup; it can scan and print. It can play games. It can suck a cherry-pip through a straw. You know you want to vote for this.

Sure, the others will make mows about warranties. Let them. We all know that if a component’s going to fail, it’s overwhelmingly likely to do so within the first few weeks. Once a computer gets past that point, odds are it’ll keep going forever. And my PC has already had an extensive burn-in test, courtesy of its first owner. I’m not scared.

So come vote, and let’s bring the £250 Challenge to its grand, inevitable conclusion. All you have to do is fill out a short survey and select a winner (me) to be entered into a draw to win one of the four PCs in the contest (Stuart’s machine is disqualified because, let’s be honest, it’s no prize). And I’ll probably get a Mars bar or something.

You have your orders: now go! Fill in that survey… and vote!

I know, I know, it’s a bit bland. And it doesn’t have a monitor. And that chassis is mostly empty as it doesn’t really have much inside it. And it can’t keep up with the other PCs. And there’s actually nothing behind that little door on the front.

But my £250 PC – bought fully formed and totally new from Ebuyer.com – has at least TWO strengths that propel it past the garish nastiness of Mike’s monster, the ageing unreliability of Darien’s pile of tat and Mr Fearon’s little portable non-PC oddity.

For a start it has a proper operating system! Not a combination of an expiring Windows 7 beta and an Ubuntu distro that Mike couldn’t get working. Not Vista Home Basic or XP Media Center (ok, I do actually like the last one). No, my PC has Vista Home Premium, an operating system that even my grandad knows how to work. Slowly.

It also has a warranty, a whole year of cover to guard against any of the bits inside failing – which they won’t because they’re all brand new. And with plenty of spare slots inside you could keep making this system better as you grow to love it like a particularly nerdy, disappointing child.

When all’s said and done, the remit for this challenge was to spend that £250 on a good all-round PC, and I feel reliability is a huge part in that. Is Mike going to pop round to yours after work to fix the CPU he’s pushed too far? Will anyone pay for a new printer when the dust in Darien’s takes its inevitable toll? If mine fails a real, qualified, computer expert will come to your house and fix it. He might even bring chocolates.

For that reason alone, I urge you to do the right thing. Reject exciting unreliability. Reward safe mediocrity. Vote for the internet PC. Please.

If you’re fortunate enough to be living in the UK, you can pick up the latest issue of PC Pro – complete with The £250 Challenge feature – at any good newsagent until the 15th of April. This month’s issue also includes group tests on laptops from as little as £304 (the “netbook killers” shown on the front), motherboards and over 50 CPUs. Other highlights include a guide to setting up a no-risk web business and our step-by-step guide to exploring the stars from your PC.

But getting to this stage has been a monumental hassle – far more so than I’d anticipated. When I volunteered for the £250 Challenge I thought buying second-hand would be easy: just scout around the various classified and auction sites, visit the local second-hand shops, draw up a shortlist, fire off a few emails, bish bash bosh, job done.

eBay the better

My first reality check came when I discovered the extent to which the second-hand market has coalesced around eBay. It’s not the only game in town – Gumtree and Craigslist are obvious alternatives, and after my last post some of you kindly directed me to sites specialising in refurbished and overstock machines, such as IT Auctions and ITClear. But next to the thousands of systems on eBay their listings look very sparse. And while High Street shops like Computer Exchange offer instant gratification, their stock is generally even more limited.

There’s one obvious reason for eBay’s dominance: having got into the game early, eBay has benefited hugely from the network effect. Buyers go to eBay because that’s where the sellers are, and vice versa. But it’s not just the range of items that makes it a winner: as I browsed around I quickly found that eBay’s search templates and filters made it easy to drill down to the products I was interested in, while other sites left me browsing through irrelevant ads.

Plus, when I found an eBay listing I liked, I felt confident the item was still available, which is more than I could say for the week-old classifieds that turned up on other sites. In short order, the clarity and convenience of eBay won me over.

Auction stations

But eBay wasn’t a perfect solution. The first problem I hit was that with auction-type sales it’s almost impossible to stick to a budget. When I placed bids on systems close to £250, the price inevitably crept over my limit and someone else ended up winning the auction. If I focused on cheaper systems I ran the risk of paying over the odds for a clapped-out old banger of a PC.

And of course, when you lose an auction you’re left simply waiting around for another suitable one to conclude, which is a huge waste of time. I wrote off much of Friday and most of my Saturday trying (in vain) to sneak a bargain under the hammer, before giving up on auctions altogether and switching my attention to the “Buy It Now” listings.

We want it now

This brought its own complications. Though eBay is best known as a site for private sales, it also hosts tens of thousands of “eBay shops”, through which back-room merchants peddle refurbished and custom-built PCs (and other goods), normally on a fixed-price basis.

There’s no particular harm in buying from a reseller like this – indeed, they may well be more knowledgeable and organised than your John Smiths looking to make a few quid off their old Packard Bell. But for me to do so would hardly be within the spirit of the £250 Challenge… so once I switched to “Buy It Now” I was left wading through thousands of commercial listings trying to find a bona fide individual from whom to buy my system.

Sell me lies

On the way, incidentally, I noticed a shocking amount of flagrant mis-selling, normally from unscrupulous resellers looking to take advantage of ill-informed shoppers. A favourite trick was to multiply the processor speed by the number of cores, so a 3GHz Core 2 Duo would be advertised as a 6GHz CPU (indeed, I saw several Phenom systems advertised with a remarkable clock speed of 10.4GHz). Base systems would often be advertised with a photo showing a large TFT monitor. Other product images were superimposed with bogus awards or company logos. I noted several unauthorised uses of the PC Pro masthead and award logos, none of them relating to products we’ve actually endorsed.

And when I did find an honest-to-goodness private seller, the item was all too often listed as “collection only” – raising the effective price and throwing a side order of inconvenience into the bargain (unless you’re lucky enough to live next door to the seller, which isn’t likely). Most annoyingly of all, several advertisers thought this constituted “free delivery”, and advertised their items accordingly.

Time, time, time… see what’s become of me

Eventually, at mid-morning on Sunday, I found a system that had a reasonable specification, at the right price, from a seller who was willing to deliver. Needless to say, I leapt at it. The transaction itself went smoothly, and, assuming the seller is as good as his word, it should be with me later this week. Looking across at the systems David Bayon and Mike Jennings are putting together, I think it might measure up rather well.

But though it looks like my tale has a happy ending, it came at quite a cost. Before you start scouring eBay for your next computer, remember just how many hours I ended up sinking in pursuit of a system that was right for me. You’ve heard the old canard about Linux: they say it’s a great way to save money, so long as you don’t value your time. Well, the same applies, with knobs on, to buying a second-hand PC.

I am confident of success. For lo! I have a secret weapon.

The staff in most London shops are a canny bunch, legendary for sizing up the wherewithal of potential customers as soon as they walk in the shop and setting their prices to match. But I have a tool, faced with which all shopkeepers will buckle and, most likely, weep before giving me anything of my choice for mere pennies.

It’s a special, secret phrase that only I know about. What you have to do is you go into a shop, look dismissively at a piece of hardware and then say (casually, with a knowing air):

“What’s your best price on this?”

That’s the key phrase. Best price. It always, always works.

You need to be looking down your nose just a little bit, but not so much that you seem arrogant. It’s a look that has to say, “You and I are both men of the world, and I know that you know that what I’ve just said means I know your game and can match you in any fight.”

The other key tactic I’m going to use, obviously, is to snort derisively at the first price I’m offered, halve it and fire it right back. After all, as Eric Idle said, you’ve gotter ‘aggle.

Or was it Michael Palin?

Yeah okay, so I’ve haggled for an electronic item probably twice in my life and was terrified on both occasions. I tend to clear my throat, cheeks burning, and sort of squeak, “Erm, what’s, erm, your best, uh, price on this please?” like a teenager on his first terrifying foray into Boots to buy those things.

Help!

What are your best haggling techniques? How am I going to match the power of online buying in a central London shop with rental overheads? Any more tricks?

I thank you.

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:

· Ebuyer Extra Value Black/Silver Cube Case with 650W PSU and LCD – £48.93

· Celeron Dual Core E1200 – £36.91

· ABIT I-945V socket 775 motherboard – £25.53

· 2GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM – £15.99

· 500GB hard disk – £38.10

· Radeon HD 4350 – £29.61

· Blu-ray ROM drive – £67.46

That adds up to £262.53 – a mite over twelve pounds too expensive. I’m aware that I could drop to 1GB of RAM and reduce the size of the hard disk to save cash, but it still feels awfully close to the bone.

Other issues present themselves when putting together a media centre rig, too. I’ve not included an operating system because shelling out for XP or Vista – even an OEM version – is just too big a chunk of my budget. Whatever PC I decide to build, then, will be using Ubuntu, which is the only version of Linux I’ve had any experience with. I’ll have to check whether legal Blu-ray playback is possible with Ubuntu – a couple of quick searches reveal that the issue has certainly had a murky past, and it doesn’t seem that the question of Open Source Blu-ray hasn’t been resolved yet. More searching is required – and, as usual, tips from anyone reading are more than welcome.

The other issue is cost. If anyone can find these components for less cash – bearing in mind that the cost of delivery has to be factored in, too – then I’d be absolutely delighted. If you know of any possible solutions, then please let me know.

And, if this doesn’t work out? I plan to ditch the monitor and speakers and build an overclocked, Open Source gaming rig with a ludicrous case and, hopefully, a few bells and whistles. Tomorrow, hopefully, is ordering day.

Every machine that we review has two things in common, though: none of them cost £250, and not one of them has suffered the indignity of being thrown together by my unsubtle and leaden hands.

Nevertheless, I’ve been asked to put together a serviceable and usable PC for £250. It didn’t initially sound too challenging, but the more I explored the challenge the more I discovered that huge corners would have to be cut and I’d have to be extremely canny with my purchasing.

However, I do also think that I have an instant advantage over some of my colleagues. For one, I don’t have to include a profit margin in my rig’s spec-list and, for another, I can indulge in some enthusiastic overclocking. I can also seek out parts from big-name manufacturers rather than relying on the lesser-quality, proprietary components that may be used elsewhere. To that end, I spent some time seeking out some of the cheap parts that I’d need for my PC, and came up with several possibilities:

· The processor would be an Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200, costing £57.60

· An Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT is a budget card, and would set me back £44.72

· 2GB of RAM at £16.43

· A 250GB hard disk that I’d found for £31.99

· A 17in monitor for £65.23

After a busy morning’s surfing, my shopping list already totalled £215.97, and I hadn’t factored in a case, keyboard, mouse, optical drive or even a motherboard. It looks as if my ambitions are going to have to be severely reigned in if I’m going to cram everything into this machine.

However, a bit more time on some of the big shopping websites reveal that there are some bargains to be had. I’ve managed to find an Intel Celeron E1200 processor for £36.91 – it may not be a Pentium Dual Core, but it’s still dual core and still very, very overclockable. I’ve paired this with a £32 ABIT motherboard, but I’m still furiously searching for plenty else to install into this super-cheap machine.

And that, dear reader, is where you come in: at the moment, my vision for this PC is as wide and open as the Windows XP default wallpaper, and as malleable as putty. I’m open to any suggestions as to how I can make this rig the best on offer come the end of the £250 challenge – so whether you envisage it being a budget gaming beast or a tiny, silent media centre, please let me know what’s on your mind.

I’m also open to suggestions as to where I can find the multitude of components that I need for this machine – so the cheaper and more reliable the supplier the better. With emphasis on the cheaper, of course, given the stringent budget that’s been laid down by our supreme Editor.

So, if you have any comments or suggestions regarding my machine – any tips on component choices, where to buy them or any building advice – then I’m happy to hear them. I’m looking forward to reading your feedback and proving that you can build a PC on a £250 budget – and get a better rig that can be found anywhere else.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/01/20/a-complete-pc-package-for-250-no-problem/feed/ 28 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/01/20/first-stop-dells-pc-emporium/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/01/20/first-stop-dells-pc-emporium/#comments Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:19:37 +0000 David Bayon http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=5036 So my job this fortnight, as you may have discovered in Tim’s call to arms, is to spend £250 of his money on a brand new fully-built PC or laptop, using only the medium of this interweb thingy. All phones off the hook, face-to-face conversation on hold; this is just me, my surfing skills and his wallet. Heaven.

My first port of call was obvious: Dell. Where better to find a rock-bottom bargain PC to make this whole task as easy as a few quick clicks, feet up on the desk and a delivery in the post room? Well, as you ask, quite a lot of places actually.

It turns out Dell’s configure-your-own shopping site is unintuitive, slow and not quite as rock-bottom as I thought. Rather than wade through the huge number of systems on offer, I went straight for the cheapest PC on Dell’s books, the Inspiron 530 Desktop PC. At £279 it was too dear, but I was confident there would be something I could remove from Dell’s pages and pages of customisation options.

Unfortunately, this being Dell’s most basic system, the options were already set to the cheapest available, with just two exceptions. I could remove the mouse for a hefty saving of, um, nothing, or I could jettison the bog-standard keyboard to shave slightly more from the price, as evidenced below.

I didn’t ask it to ‘Help me choose’.

Undeterred, I decided to take a different tack, and opened Dell’s excellent Live Chat facility which brings instant conversation with a Dell Sales Expert. Fired up by the possibility of a bit of bartering, I assumed a cunning pseudonym, connected with a helpful chap called Pradeep and began to pester. With an impressive lack of success.

Fair play to him, he got to the point. Asking for a discount on a £1,000 luxury system is one thing, having the nerve to do so on the cheapskate systems is another entirely.

Almost time to move on, but the visit to Dell’s online megastore wasn’t a total washout. My shortlist at least has its first provisional entry, in the form of the £249 Dell Inspiron mini 9 netbook. The only problem is it’ll take more than a fairly average netbook to beat whatever the others guys produce from their own hunting. A lot more. Onwards!

The precise source is up to me: I can scour classified ads, place bids on auction sites or even try to persuade David Fearon to sell me one of his cast-offs. But the PC I buy has to be pre-loved, and it has to come in at £250 or less.

I admit, it’s not an approach I’ve tried before. Being by nature an impatient sod, my usual purchasing strategy is simply to march into a shop and slap down a credit card. This will, I suspect, be a learning experience for me.

But that doesn’t mean I have to go into it completely blind. So, dear readers: what should I be looking out for? Share the benefits of your experience, and tell me your tips and warnings.

Otherwise, on my first foray into the second-hand arena, I’ve every chance of getting screwed around and ripped off. And you wouldn’t want to see that, would you?