Very foolish principle as it costs you money! Their special offers probably make them the cheapest (by far) in the UK. There are special offers pretty much every day. Look at hotukdeals.com and you will get the codes.
I buy a lot of PCs of all specifications and dont even look elsewhere now. I have never once paid a Dell delivery charge as the special offers always include free delivery.
Very easy under Linux, not sure about MSWindows. The problems with Windows recovery disks are that they often format the whole hard disk, install lots of things the manufacturers include but the user doesn't need, and that Windows doesn't keep user files and settings in one coherent easily-restored place.
My Documents doesn't usually hold address book or mailbox files, custom spelling dictionaries etc.
Owain
I'm not a games person but I have to have access to a range of hardware because of the need to compare & contrast the machines. That means that I do have a Windows machine that (mainly) acts as a printer facilitator and time-slipped radio - in addition to half-a-dozen RISC OS machines. ;-) for the latter. ;-)
I suppose docs and settings might be a better bet in XP but possibly a lot of the garbage you're trying to get rid of would be there too.
Er, it will if it's written in conformant html/xhtml. Just run it through validator.w3.org and bob's yer uncle[1].
And the server can happily be a 486:-)
Dunno anythig about games...
Douglas de Lacey [1] Once you've fixed the 56 errors in writing the code, of course.
ROFL.... ROFLMAO....
Ok, in the *real* world, where each browser has its own bugs and oddities, it doesn't quite work out that way.
Valid code is all very well, but if you need a site to look *exactly the same* in a number of browsers (as most clients require), you need to test and tweak until you achieve this.
Some of our busier sites get such a load that you need more than one (P4 3GHz+) server per site.
An extremely naive view. Not long ago I wrote a set of pages for a small site, and they validated as XHTML 1.0, and I also validated the style sheet.
On one version of IE there was a major hissy fit and each paragrahph came out as a single line.
This is the real world...
You need to tell your clients that they're asking for crap sites. *No* properly designed site looks the same in a true range of browsers and anyone who promises such is a fool or a rogue.
Erm, ok, will do.
On second thoughts, maybe I'll just keep doing a great job and getting paid for it.
I hate hobby web developers, they always come up with clueless cr@p like this.
I'm not a hobby web developer. I don't develop web sites at all. I employ professionals to produce advice. If you offer to produce a web site that 'looks the same' to all/most web browsers then you are a poor amateur.
If you want to stay close to the leading edge you don't in reality get much choice no matter ow much care you put into chosing the original spec with the intention of having an expandable platform. There is always a show stopper that will bite you IME.
For example you want to upgrade the CPU but the two year old mobo does not support the latest ones for any of a muktitude of reasons: the front side bus speed, the DRAM type, the voltage, the standby current, the number of pins in the socket, there is no BIOS available for the CPU etc.
The latest graphics card requires AGP 8x rather than 4, or you need PCI express, or SLI
Hard drives and disk subsystems in general are easier to future proof, although you top of the line ultra 160 SCSI controller may not get best performance from your new 15K rpm iltra 320 drive...
So in many cases some drives, the case, and your floppy drive live on - the rest has to change from time to time.
You are not really comparing like with like. Your old system is no longer leading edge. If you thrust software on it that required 10 times the CPU performance to even work, it would not hack it at anything approaching a suitable speed. That was what Grunff was attempting to maintain.
I still use a 10 year old platform for email and other tasks. It does them as well as it ever did and never suffers problems with the usual Wintel malware but I can hardly claim it is in any way comparable to modern hardware performance wise in spite of having a hugely efficient multi tasking OS.
In general - Evil b*stard things...
Some are better than others - but some are downright evil.
However if you were a user who had convinced they needed to do a repair install of windows and had not realised that the recovery CD would vape the complete machine and all your data, you could be a bit miffed!
Easy enough. You can create a slipstreamed windows install CD if you want that includes all the updates and drivers for your PC. However if you just want a fast recovery to a known state then either look at an imaging product like Ghost - that will let you image a drive to a file and then later recreate the drive state from the image in a matter of mins. Alternatively look at one of the virtual PC solutions. Lets you create a complete virtual PC running in its own sandbox that you can simply restart to be back to a default state.
If you want a boot CD that will let you tinker with the remenents of a crashed windows box then I find the "Bart PE" bootable CD quite handy. Lets you boot from a CD, get a network up and running and run a file manager utility with full disk access - way better than the MS recovery console.
I notice they do 'open systems' versions without a copy of Windows. But you have to phone for that. Anyone know why they are so coy about those prices?
I know what my system will and will not do. If I wanted to play the latest games I'd buy a games machine. What is *not* happening here - but does happen with Windows machines - is the pernicious step of new applications (or essential updates) being made available only for the new OS even where they don't need the 'power' of the new OS. That's the ratchet that forces users to buy new machines - and where they then find that old software doesn't work and has to be re-purchased.
My hardware/software is comparable to 'modern' performance except in clearly defined ways (speed/resolution). It makes working in parallel with new machines easy and transitions comfortable. At the moment I'm switching between
4 machines with peer-to-peer networking, using the same monitor/keyboard/mouse and moving applications and day-to-day working over to a beta status computer; if I encounter problems I can slip back to the old machine at a second's notice.
With computers the problem now is that a monopoly supplier is telling you what the leading edge is - and the direction you're travelling in is not your choice anymore. You get more/faster and forget what you leave behind.
Ok, that explains the ridiculous statements you've made.
Look, there really is no point in discussing this further. You clearly have very little idea of what the market demands. Perhaps this is because you're stuck in a horribly outdated RISC OS world, I don't know.
But either way, these days clients are very demanding. They want high functionality sites, and they want high graphics sites. By their very nature, high graphics sites rely on pixel perfect positioning of some elements relative to others. If this isn't achieved, things don't line up correctly and the site looks crap. This means that you *have* to build your sites to look the same across different browsers/platforms, and that takes way more than a pass through with a validator.
See
Aha. I see. Thank you. It's all a con then!
Probably I'll get an IBM instead...at least last time they were happy to sell me machines with no OS...
If you don't the site looks different in different browsers and according to the settings chosen by the user. But then you cannot claim that the site 'looks the same or similar' in all or most browsers.
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