Could McAfee (and Firefox) kill spam?

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Today I received the most convincing phishing email yet to hit my inbox, to the extent that it inspired enough doubt in my mind that I clicked on one of the links (making sure my security software was up to date first, just in case!).

Why was I fooled? For one, it actually had my name in the email, and for another we as a magazine have been focusing on eBay for the last month or two as part of the investigative cover feature that adorns the current issue (eBay exposed). Could it be some sort of malicious attack from an eBay devotee, a paranoid part of my mind wondered?

(more…)

The £250 challenge: vote for the good PC

Monday, March 16th, 2009

So, as you’ve doubtless already seen, the £250 Challenge is now in its final phase. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and rush out and buy the latest issue of PC Pro right now.

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. (more…)

A hidden hazard of eBay

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

A few days ago, this arrived for me. It’s my £250 Challenge PC, as packaged up by the seller and delivered to me by Parcelforce.

If you look closely (click on the picture for a larger view), you may notice that it didn’t actually arrive in pristine condition. The box was clearly battered and crushed in transit, developing a big split up the side through which the contents could easily have fallen out. (more…)

Second-hand? Several days-hand, more like

Monday, January 26th, 2009

Well, it’s done: over the weekend I bit the bullet and ordered my second-hand PC for the £250 Challenge. It’s a decent-looking machine, with a Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM and a 19in TFT, which should make it a very viable desktop PC. Hopefully our dear editor Tim Danton will agree when he comes to judge our entries.

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. (more…)

caveat manūs secundae emptor

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

So, as you’ll have seen, the PC Pro £250 Challenge is afoot. Over the next week or two my colleagues and I will be doing our best to find (or assemble) a killer PC for no more than half a monkey. And my personal quest is to obtain a dream machine on the second-hand market.

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?

eBay your ideas

Friday, August 15th, 2008

We’re in a knowledge economy now, so I’m told. Unfortunately, capitalising on knowledge can be hard. Just because you know exactly how many episodes of the Simpsons each and every periphery character appears in, doesn’t mean that it’s going to earn you any money. Similarly, being able to list the ten most common colours that cars from 1993 were bought in isn’t going to pay for that swimming pool you hanker after. (more…)

Google and eBay’s e-commerce argument

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

It’s emerged today that some supposedly ‘anonymous’ criticism of eBay’s proposed monopolisation of Paypal actually came from the bowels of Google. The information was found in some meta-data – the information that links documents to where they’ve come from, among other things – with the name of the document listed as ‘Microsoft Word – 204481916_1_ACCC Submission by Google re eBay Public _2_.DOC’. Pretty damning, it seems, when the submission was supposed to be anonymous.

Oops.

(more…)