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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Ubuntu disappointment and data disasters

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Ubuntu 8.10 made its appearence this week, and while everybody was busy touting the network manager’s new-fangled ability to handle mobile broadband connections, what nobody seemed to be mentioning was that it doesn’t actually work very well.

The networking manager is brilliant. It’s a nice clean interface that shows you all the internet connections on your computer, whether that’s Wi-Fi, mobile broadband or any other. It works fantastically well for Wi-Fi, putting Vista’s overly fiddly version in the shade. 

Mobile broadband is an entirely different matter, though. We have three USB dongles in the office – hangovers from our mobile broadband comparison feature. Of the three, Ubuntu refused to recognise the O2 dongle even existed, and while it acknowledged the BT dongle, it had absolutely no idea what to do with it. In fact, lucky number 3 was the only one that worked, but it worked beautifully. We just plugged it in, selected the 3 option and off we went. No need to install software or drivers of any sort. Great stuff, but country to popular opinion, one out of three is actually bad. (more…)