Its partly historical. They used to use kit with non standard pinouts on things like PSUs. It meant that swapping parts was very costly since you ended up needing to swap lots of bit you would not normally need to.
They don't tend to do that much these days, although if you buy the business class systems they often lack simple things like an extra HDD drive bay, or come with IDE cables with only one connector etc.
The other difficulty is that jo public tends to get saddled with lowest cost call centre support.
I had a DSG rep from PC World business offering me some similar sound spec HP boxes at £200+VAT the other day - with a further £50 rebate! They must be keen to shift them.
No, vista is a total dog on 512MB (even Home Basic), and fairly non responsive in 1GB based on the machines I have tried. Number one requirement specced by most of our customers seems to be "Can I still have XP?"
In 20 odd years working with them I've never bought a ready made desktop PC. I've had some but never from new etc.
The advantages of d-i-y have already been mentioned and none of it is difficult if you are 1) Handy AND 2) Interested.
A good thing about building your own is that you don't have to waste any time removing the shovelware that most new machines seem covered in. Another plus (for us 'handy' people) is with d-i-y the parts themselves are guaranteed, so if say the DVDRW fails you (ideally) walk IT down to your local high street PC repair place (rather than the big sheds) and probably walk away with a replacement. ie. You don't have to wait in for an engineer who may or may not turn up or have to unplug the whole lot and lug it back to where you bought it from and wait X days to get it back (possibly minus your data etc)?
As for Dell, never bought anything off them but have played with hundreds of their machines and I'd go with the general replies so far and say they were better than some.
My favourite laptop isn't my fairly new Toshiba but an old Dell I was given and repaired (failed backlight). ;-)
If you do fancy d-i-y I'm sure there are many here who would be willing to advise etc. As mentioned it generally won't be cheaper than buying off the shelf but think of it like buying a hand made car rather than a mass produced one . The actual building will take less time than deciding what you want or installing the OS[1] and extras etc. ;-)
All the best ..
T i m
[1] I'd still go for XP (£50 when bought with yer 'kit'). Vista is too new and although I have played a fair bit with Linux wouldn't offer it as a desktop on *your* main machine (just yet anyway). ;-)
Visions of John with his underpants on the outside of his trousers going around all the PC stores and installing Linux on all of their display systems - saving them from themselves. :-)
It's sluggish anyway.
Here's a video on how to install it:
formatting link
My desktop at home
Tried Gnome? This seems to be a bit lighter weight.
I had the same problem with Dell.... could never get the price online to match the price in a Dell flyer. (It was always more online)
Gave up in the end and bought from DABS, in fact I have bought two laptops from DABS, maybe I would have bought both of them from Dell if my attempt online had been a satisfying experience.
I've never succeeded in buying a computer from Dell. First attempt was a few years ago. I had a question regarding the computer system I was thinking of buying from them and filled in their contact form. A couple of days later I got a huge email back that they said had been written by a "robot". The robot had analysed my question and provided seven possible answers - none of which related to my question. There was a link to click on the email which sent the original question to a human being. I did this but never got an answer. I took the view that if pre-sales were this bad I wasn't going to find out what their post-sales support was like.
The second occasion I tried to buy a computer from them was a couple of months ago. I thought they may have improved by now. I waded through lots of screens specifying processor, memory etc etc. It took at least an hour to get everything specified exactly as I wanted it. Got to the final page and it wanted to know my UK delivery address. Things came to an abrupt halt there. I live in Normandy so it was impossible to buy. Complete waste of time. Dell.fr are no good because I want a computer with UK keyboard, English OS / UK regional settings.
I finally opted to buy from Insight computers. No problem shipping abroad.
John Stumbles wrote in news:WRCfj.563$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe6-win.ntli.net:
Err... Wny no mention of Quanta Computer, the world's largest manufacturer of laptops? IIRC they are the OEM for around 35% of all such products. Just to give an idea of the scale of their operations they employ some 30,000 people...
I can certainly see the benefits of building your own, but AFAICS for an average sort-of joe-public-specced PC I can't see how you're ever going to save money on building your own these days.
Last time I looked into doing this I was going to cannibalise my old PC, and use what I could from that, however there was no way I could get close to the overall cost of a new PC (which I bought monitor-less from Dell).
Seconded. Dells ordinary prices aren't great. The offer prices are often very good. There's another site that lists them but I can't remember it's name. It's also worth noting that if you use Quidco (note the model code to get to the model you want), you can get another 3% kickback. With a cashback credit card, quidco and the 10% offer you'd be getting on for 15% discount.
There's no money to be saved. Buying parts that I actually trust rather than the absolute cheapest stuff available, I couldn't get near Dell's retail prices. "Proper" retail PCs as built by Dell, HP and the likes have major advantages over the home built machine - you have zero compatibility problems (IIRC Dell test every permutation of machine they sell), and the machines are almost silent. Even machines I've built specifically to be quiet are nowhere near as quiet as this Dell is. If it breaks, it's not your problem, and you get all your licenced software chucked in. Before someone starts beating me with the Linux stick, I've been meddling with it since Redhat 5 was current, and whilst Ubuntu is a long way from Redhat 5, it's still not really suitable for someone who wants to do a lot of different bits and bobs on their computer without a lot of hassle. It's perfect for my Dad as all he wants is a screen with Ebay on it, which will never break once it's been set up, but for serious day to day use it's a pain the arse.
IME Dell's service is good, if you know your way around a computer already. If you don't, then it's not going to be very helpful, but then no phone support ever really will be, but Dell's is compounded by being based in India, making misunderstandings more likely.
And franky, the idea that "you'll know how to fix it" doesn't really make any odds - if you can use a screwdriver, you can swap parts in a PC, and >95% of PC problems are with software, not hardware.
Mainly from hearsay, and (having thought / talked more) because of the ones at work. As mentioned by another post, they seem to tailored by cutting out any uneccessary extras. Generally Dell appear to be good for support (you can download the service manuals for laptops, and buy individual keytops from Canada via Ebay), but the sales seem to be determined to make you spend more than you originally thought - stand firm! As regards memory size, XP now seems to need more than 512MB to be happy. Might be the Windows upgrades keep wanting a little more each time ? Not seen Vista on anything less than 1GB, and contrary to pouplar opinion, a couple of tech guys (not PC World) have said it is very good for network admin and media handling - just need to persevere and customise a little. hth Neil
I was in a local computer shop where they mainly repair than sell. Two people had bought laptops from PC wurld and were almost begging matey to put WIN XP on the machines, as they just couldn't stand another day of the intrusiveness of Vista!..let alone the performance!...
================================== You probably can't save money overall but if you do re-use items from an old PC then the money saved on those items can be used to get a better specification on the things that matter - e.g. more memory than an 'off-the-shelf' box.
It's hardly worth trying to sell an outgrown PC because they're worth so little so it makes good sense to cannibalise the old and dump the corpse.
Well if you but the bits from the right places you can make a better PC especially some money directed at quite power units and low noise cooling and of course you learn a bit and can mend the gubbins..
However unless the field support id very good expect to pack it off for repair especially if its a laptop. For this very reason I bought a couple of second hand dell latitude's quite good machines, from a place locally that repairs them.. quite rare but worth it in case of need:)...
Cic, interesting site, but seems a bit specific and not quite up-to-date. I'm not knocking it, it has some good info, but might not have enough for a novice. Such as making sure the motherboard, cpu, and ram will all fit together... ... probably have to update site every week or two to keep up ! hth Neil
You'll not save much money over special offers on complete machines but will get one *exactly* to your spec. It forces you into deciding what you really want. You'll also have the not inconsiderable benefit of having a warranty on each and every part - rather than the whole. Also all the parts will be standard and easily updated if you decide on this within a reasonable time scale. It's also rather satisfying for one brought up on Meccano. ;-)
I suppose it depends on whether a basic machine suits your needs. If however you want state of the art sound and graphic cards etc it might not be so true.
On a cost basis, you won't, simply because you won't get the price levels on one off purchases of the components that an integrator does.
DIY for PCs is interesting because of the ability to select the individual components, although even that has been dumbed down; i.e. there are two significant video card players from the chipset perspective - NVidia and ATI. For desktop systems, there are SATA drives with a few different chipset options for the controller. After that, it's pick which CPU and memory that you want.
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