The pater just emailed saying he’s thinking about getting a new PC at home and looking for recommendations. I put it to the virtual floor.
Is it a PC or laptop? What’s the primary use for it - presume it’s typing and the likes and not gaming?
Family PC - internetting and word processing mainly.
To be honest you don’t need much power at all for the tasks you have outlined. You’d pick up a fine, competent PC for a few hundred from Dell or PC World or somewhere like that.
Easiest choices are really:
- Buy a Dell - better value but because you’re buying online there’s less obvious support. You can still choose an appropriate support package but many people obviously feel more comfortable with a bricks and mortar store. Also you can customise the machine so you only pay for the features you want.
- Buy a machine from Harvey Norman, Dixon’s or PC World. Slighly less bang for your buck but again perfectly fine machines to be had for 5/600 and you’re dealing with a real person.
I have a dell at home and I’ve never had any problems with it. My da got one a few months ago and it’s grand too - though I did delete a load of crap unwanted software from the machine first just to make it run better.
Things to look out for when buying:
- flat panel displays (standard now) are nicer than old style monitors, save loads of space and can be useful for consoles like the Xbox 360 as well
- a DVD burner is a nice function to have for backing up old DVD’s that you might own the copyright to
- Try and go for plenty of RAM (at least 1GB) and plenty of hard disk space for storing movies, music etc.
This is a decent budget Compaq from PC World http://www.pcworld.ie/productDetails.aspx?productRID=1759&image=Compaq (649). Just checked something similar in Dell and it wasn’t much cheaper.
Final suggestions - have a look at http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/default.aspx?c=ie&cs=&l=en&s=dfh&~ck=anavml which is the “Outlet store” for Dell in Ireland. Some decent bargains there from time to time.
Also you could look out for upcoming PC sales in Aldi or Lidl but they tend to be difficult to come by (queues) and mostly are higher end computers than what you require.
Thanks for that. Forwarded it to the auld lad.
As an aside, there’s an Archos MP3 player on sale in Currys, 80GB, down from 550 to 350.
Crap I should have put something sly about wearing a leather jacket in.
What sort of Archos is it? Do you know the model number? And is it an MP4 or MP3?
Finally, how’s your machine holding up?
Very happy with my machine. No videos yet but put what I thought was a shitload of music on it and it turned out to be only 7GB. This included 8 or 9 Queen albums and a similar amount of Rory Gallagher albums so was quite delighted with my haul. Really don’t know why I never had one of these before.
The Archos machine was an S304 as I recall - MP3.
My mistake. Believe it’s a 504. The brother-in-law went in for a gander when I told him about it and wasn’t impressed.