What would you do?

[True Blue]

My laptop with all of my music and photos has died a death (backed up on external HDD phew!!), anyway got a repair guy out of the local paper to have a look and it is the motherboard power regulator and needs a new motherboard.

Long story short, decided it would be more cost efficient to buy a new desktop as the laptop never moved anyway.

Now the same guy that had a look at the PC also builds them and gave me a cracking quote to build a new one.........however the company has only been in existance since the beginning of this year......he is offering an 18 months parts and labour guarentee

or

A slightly lower spec (one down in the chipset and 1gb less ram) and I can get a similar machine from John Lewis with a three year guarentee on.

Now would you go with the company built on an excellent reputation or would you support the local businessman trying to prosper in a difficult time??

 

[Anonymous]

I used to be in the IT game, offering support to individuals and small businesses, and that included building PCs.

Over the last 2 years, cost of building a PC is so close to buying one of similar spec, that there was little profit to be made.

Check that the cost of the bespoke PC includes an operating system (Windows), and that it is a genuine version. If not, steer clear.

You can find some good PC bargains on the PC World website - click the Refurbished button... Or you could try building your own; it's really very easy. If you can put a hifi together, you can build a PC. Buy parts from www.ebuyer.com and www.aria.co.uk, and if you are a parent of a child at school, or if you are a student, you can buy software dirt cheap from www.software4students.co.uk. (I've just bought Office 2010 Professional Plus for £40; I could buy Windows 7 for the same price).

 

[True Blue]

Must admit I am toying with buying the bits and building myself. I am local to a Novatech who supply barebone bundles so all I would ned to add are drives and graphics / sound cards. Have used software for students prior. Suppose its just a case od taking the plunge.

 

[Gerrardasnails]

True Blue:Must admit I am toying with buying the bits and building myself. I am local to a Novatech who supply barebone bundles so all I would ned to add are drives and graphics / sound cards. Have used software for students prior. Suppose its just a case od taking the plunge.

I'm a novice but I've added RAM and hard drives to my pc. I would go with Dell personally and add to the spec yourself.

 

[Anonymous]

Also depends on what the 3yr warranty covers (whatif you opened it to add upgrade a component for instance). Some other aspects: make sure you get the OS (W7) version suited to you, and at an OEM (i.e. in combination with a pc) rather than retail price, don't think I'll buy the OS later. Building a pc is actually not that difficult, and you can buy exactly the components you like (such as a good sound card, quiet PS and CPU fan). And in general working in a bigger case is easier than is a small stylish box. As said, don't do it to save lots of money.

 

[John Duncan]

I'd buy from John Lewis or direct from Dell.

 

[chebby]

A third Dell recommendation from me too.

Buy direct from them. (I buy from their small-medium business site.)

Opt for a three or four year next business day, onsite support package, (They really do turn up the next day and call you the previous evening to arrange a good time.)

(John Lewis by contrast will send your machine away for repair.)

I know lots of people with Novatech machines (living - just as you do - near the company) and have heard lots of complaints too.

We have used Dell at work too (three generations of machines over about 10 years now) and I have never heard of any serious problems from colleagues in that time.

 

[chebby]

After three and a half years of experience I could recommend an Apple iMac also.

The latest 21.5" iMac is about the best value Apple at £999. (Debatable value compared to other brands obviously.)

Buy direct from Apple and take out 3 year Apple Care for an additional £139.

The latest ones look stunning and you will probably get some audio benefits especially if you use iTunes on Apple (compared to a PC) and it has an optical digital output.

The basic iMac 21.5" spec gives you a 500GB HD and 4GB RAM (my older one is 320GB HD and 3GB RAM) which is plenty for a lot of people to get all their music on.

Full system (bootable clone) backup & restore is a doddle using SuperDuper! software and I have had to use it in anger once when the harddrive failed and was replaced. Took 20 minutes and about 5 mouseclicks and a password to do a full restore, (Most of that was spent drinking tea.)

Mostly though, you buy an iMac because it looks incredible!

 

[Alec]

Does the "lesser" processor bother you? Could you easily add more RAM yourself, and would it be worth it with the cost of doing so (RAM is relatively pricey right now and if it means taking out the memory supplied and replacing it on top of adding more, you may not want to, but if there are spare DIMM slots you would be able to do it more for less)?

I have a Dell* which has had 3 new parts under warranty so, while you obviously pay more for a good warranty, I was relieved that I had. Also, I had their help in diagnosing the problem.

With my next machine, however, I am taking the risk of buying from a local dealer who's warranties are not as good**. So I'll bask in the warm glow from patronising the local dealer, and hope for the best.

* Opinions seem to differ depending on whether you speak to people who us their business machines and warranties, and people who use their home ones. However, I had a home machine and warranty and was still pleased. I have some minor complaints, but these are not realy relevant to your question.

** I thought I could get a Dell style warranty, then discovered the one they're selling is only for labour, not parts, so you need to gen up on exactly what you're getting.

 

[Joe10155]

One thing to think about is that desktops tend to be noisier than laptops due to the number of cheap fans used. If you are specifying your own there are a lot quieter fans out there, but as usual they are more expensive.

Check out the silentpcreview.com website for ways to create or quieten a noisy pc.

 

[True Blue]

Hmmm Dell are offering 4yrs for the price of 3. In home, dont mind the 5 business days one a bit cheaper. Can anyone who has made a claim through Dell please confirm that it includes Labour AND parts??

 

[chebby]

Yes labour and parts.

Apple too. The hard-drive on our iMac gave up a few weeks before the 3 year Apple care was due to expire. They arranged a courier to their repairer and a courier back (all at their expense) and fitted a 320GB hard-drive instead of the 250GB one it replaced.

 

[Alec]

chebby:

Yes labour and parts.

Thought I had more or less said that but yes, Chebby is quite right.

chebby:Apple too. The hard-drive on our iMac gave up a few weeks before the 3 year Apple care was due to expire. They arranged a courier to their repairer and a courier back (all at their expense) and fitted a 320GB hard-drive instead of the 250GB one it replaced.

No catches? Wish I had known before now how good they can be. Heyho.

 

[PJPro]

Hmm. I don't tend to bother with support packages myself as there's very little to go wrong. If something breaks, worst case you can replace the part. Clearly, reliance on the PC for business reasons would change that view.

I tend to go for relatively low spec (cheap) machines particularly as the vast majority of my use is web browsing. It's easy to get carried away by the spec. The important thing is to ensure there is adequate memory to run the OS and enough storage for your files....although both the RAM and HDDs can be upgraded later anyway.

Save your money. Buy cheap but buy a name you can trust or from an outlet where you can hassle people eg PC World. I bought my last PC from PC World and it's a Compaq Presario.

 

[True Blue]

Well, update.

Eventually got a Novatech machine / screen / keyboard / mouse. 3gb Ram 500GB HD, 19" screen Intel dual core something or other and a copy of windows 7. Two years parts and labour guarentee, all in £500 job done.

Spent most of the week installing and setting things back up to work as I like them.

Changed the casing fan to a 80mm Xilence silent fan (nice and quiet) in fact the nosiest thing is the CPU fan.

Excellent service from the guys at novatech and very local with an actual shop.

Few niggles setting up Sonos again, but a quick factory reset and reinstall sorted that one out.

Even managed to write a batch file for automatic backups (xcopy) to my external hard drive.

Think I might be getting this computer stuff finally LOL

Anyway next up NAS drive......................

 

[bob.g]

Too late to be of help, but I recently bought a 'refurbished' HP PC from PC World online. It was an excellent deal, and was new and unused, just less the original box and manual - and 50% less than a similar new model would have cost me.

 

[visionary]

I was going to recomend the Novatech route but I see you already took it.

I've used them a number of times and always been impressed with product and service