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 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…)

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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First stop: Dell’s PC emporium

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

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.

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Ten mini-projects for the Christmas break

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

Christmas is a welcome break from the workaday grind; but if you’re anything like me you know there’ll come a point – normally around 3pm on Boxing Day – when you’ve eaten all you can, the TV is a desert of inanity and a long boring afternoon stretches out before you.

Why not take the opportunity to do a little computer housekeeping? There are plenty of small jobs you can do in an hour or two to make your PC faster, safer and just plain nicer to use. Here’s my top ten mini-projects for the holidays.

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Don’t miss any Christmas TV with our expert guide

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

The Christmas TV schedules may be overflowing with goodies, but with hundreds of channels to keep an eye on and mum taking the remote control hostage for the Coronation Street special, how do you ensure you don’t miss any of your festive favourites?  Time to employ some high-tech tactics.

Here are five ways to ensure you’re not stuck watching re-runs of The Vicar of Dibley this Christmas.

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In defence of patching, crashing and tinkering

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

PC gaming gets a bad rap, especially from the console crowd – whereas they rock up, slide a disk into their slot-loading optical drive and play away, enjoying the latest games on the PC is, well, a more frustrating, long-winded and drawn-out experience – and it’s all the better for it.

Ask any avid PC gamer and they’ll regale you with stories of the many hours spent getting their machine to work at all. Putting in a new graphics card sounds like a basic upgrade but can often deteriorate into a horrendous rigmarole of driver updates and seemingly random problems and crashes. And that’s a relatively simple upgrade.

I should know the pain of upgrading: I recently built a new PC from scratch. My old rig really wasn’t cut out for gaming any more – it ran on integrated graphics and had no PCI Express slot – so it was definitely time for a change.

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My PC history: A road to ruin

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Microsoft has just retired Windows 3.1, a move which got me thinking about my own computing history, and how I ended up with the monstrous desktop machine that now glares at me from the corner of my bedroom. 

My first PC was a Carrera Swift, which was just slightly prettier than a sledgehammer. It had a 14in monitor, a hard drive so small I might as well have welded a floppy disk to the motherboard, no soundcard, CD drive or graphics chip, and I adored it. This will seem daft, but every computer I’ve ever owned had its own character. It’s own quirks and foibles that ensured it was more of a pet than a work machine. The Swift’s foible was that it was rubbish. Completely and utterly rubbish. 

The 4Mb of memory and 25Mhz processor were just enough to make an intruiging slideshow of Doom 2, though thankfully the “turbo” button on the front could knock the processor up to a blistering 33Mhz, and then we were cooking on gas. Not a lot of gas admittedly, but enough to be eating toast in under an hour.

In order to get anything running, whether that was Doom, Word Perfect, or anything else I had to edit the config.sys and autoexec.exe files – plucking out drivers and commands that soaked up that valuable 2k which was the dividing line between a program springing into life, and the odious “not enough conventional memory” refrain which so blighted my early PC days. God I loved that machine. It was complicated, difficult to handle, moody and yet, when it all clicked, fantastic. It’s that girlfriend. The one you know you’re best shot of, and yet the one with whom the highs are so much higher because the lows feel like flooded graves.

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Technological progress: lost on the masses

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

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No-scratch-otherness: an important buying consideration

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

I was chatting to a friend last night who happens to purchase and install hundreds of desktops in a very large company, which shall remain nameless. He was explaining just how this particular company, which has hundreds of employees on one site alone, chooses hardware.

It’s not down to budget or hardware, as you might expect – as long as they come in at around £350 they’re fine, he says, for what’s demanded of them, whatever the internal specification. Far more important are the needs of the IT department itself, and that comes down to the shape of the case.

What’s needed is “great stability and no scratch-each-otherness” when piled on top of each other, says my friend. When big bundles of computers come in they’re piled up on a desk where they’re given a standard disk image, transferred to a trolley and taken all over the site to users. Most cases don’t stand up well to this abuse, but he’s found one that does, and it has become the backbone of the organisation, all because of its “no scratch-each-otherness”.

It’s interesting that buying decisions can be made on the basis of something manufacturers may never have considered.