Comet - The High Street Rip Off

Posted on 25 Sep 2009 at 14:46

Jonathan Bray is dazzled by the honesty on display at Comet

Recession, what recession? With no-one else in my local Comet superstore and at least ten staff wandering around determinedly avoiding my pleading gaze, it took a good five minutes before someone stopped and took pity.

It was worth the wait. Upon hearing my story, the assistant instantly steered me towards a trio of dull-but-worthy 15in laptops. A pair of e-Machines laptops at £270 and £280 inc VAT, and a Toshiba L300-25G - bang on budget with nary a mention of more expensive models. What was the difference?

With the budget e-Machines systems, my dear old mum might have to put up with a poorer screen. "It won't be as bright as other brands," and the speakers wouldn't, "be as loud," either. Hmmm - a bit vague there.

But, he explained, she'd still get an Intel Celeron processor, 2GB of memory and 160GB hard disk.

Cheaper netbooks - below £250 - run Linux. It can be very fiddly for a beginner

I asked if that was enough? "Basically, that is perfect for someone that's using it for home use, even a business." We wouldn't argue with that.

So what about these netbooks I'd been hearing about? Would one of those be appropriate? The sound advice continued. He explained I could buy a decent one starting at around £250 but he wouldn't recommend going for a cheaper model as these run on Linux, which makes installing software and hardware such as printers complicated. "It can be very fiddly for a beginner," he added.

In full flow, he launched straight into a detailed explanation of the benefits and downsides of netbooks. "They don't have CD-ROMs and they're mainly designed for word-processing and internet use," he said.

Another benefit was good battery life and portability. My mum, though, I said, probably wasn't going to need to carry it around much. In that case, she'd be "better to go for a standard laptop", he said.

Other questions about software were dealt with just as honestly. The Toshiba laptop I was hovering over came with Works and that included Microsoft Word, which would be all the software she needed.

Netbooks don't have CD-ROMs and they're mainly designed for word-processing and internet use

He pointed out I could purchase a discounted subscription of Norton 360 for £30 per year with the laptop, attempted briefly to sell me a recovery disc for £15 extra (not so good) and even pointed out that it came with a free upgrade to Windows 7.

All very impressive: despite a few woolly statements here and there, our man hadn't put a foot wrong. And, despite several opportunities to upsell me to far more expensive machines, he had stuck to sensible recommendations throughout and warned me off inappropriate models when he didn't really have to.

A pleasant surprise, and certainly not what I'd expected.

Carphone Warehouse

Tesco

Independent Retailers

1 2