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Online Retailers (Dell and Mesh) - The High Street Rip Off

Posted on 25 Sep 2009 at 15:15

Mesh

Although the language barrier proved insurmountable with Dell's foreign support staff, there was no such problem with London-based PC manufacturer Mesh. While Dell's reps boasted names so exotic they could single-handedly win a game of Scrabble, Mesh offered up Dave and Rita.

Dave quickly cut to the chase, merely asking what size screen my wife was after before wading in with a recommendation for an £899 Edge M870CL laptop, with a 17in WXGA display and Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 dual-core processor.

Steady on, Dave. There's a recession on, in case you haven't noticed. Got anything cheaper back there, I asked? Dave fired back with a £699 model with 15.6in WXGA screen, and did a decent job of explaining what WXGA actually meant.

Would the 320GB hard disk on this cheaper model have enough storage to cope with my wife's digital photos? "We would recommend a large size, e.g. 500GB Hard drive," Dave shot back, glancing wistfully at the Certificate of Merit from the School of Gratuitous Upsell hanging above his desk.

How many pictures would a 500GB disk store, I enquired? "Well, it depends on the resolution/pixel rate of the photos taken," Dave replied, perfectly reasonably. "She's got a small Canon camera," I said, thinking on my feet. "Eight megapixel. She takes about 50 photos a month." Dave paused. "It would be approx. 1,000, I've been informed." I'm not sure who's Dave informant is, but I suspect they work on Dell's online chat room.

Rita was a touch more considerate, asking how much I planned to spend before recommending a machine. In what looks suspiciously like the emergence of a pattern, when I stated my maximum budget was £600, she recommended the £599 Edge 640 laptop. "Not because of the fact it meets the budget but because the Edge 10in is a 10in webbook so it won't be as good," she explained.

When I asked Rita to explain what the term "64-bit" meant in the system spec, she took her time before replying: "It's basically a quicker/faster OS. Was released with Vista."

Not strictly true, but not enough to have Trading Standards battering the door down either.

Rita made a good fist of answering the rest of the questions, and given that Mesh doesn't sell a full-size laptop for less than £600 inc VAT, she wasn't guilty of the unnecessary upsell her colleague attempted.

Carphone Warehouse

Tesco

Independent Retailers

PC World

Comet

John Lewis

Apple

Currys Digital

Avoid the high-street rip-offs

Author: Barry Collins