Hi, has anyone bought or "built" a desktop pc in the UK recently? If so, what make/model and where did you buy it from - online or shop? I am looking for a desktop pc for the wife and kids. I have an i7 laptop so I don't need anything fancy to be able to get online and print docs. (I have a monitor ready). It would be nice to have some USB ports on the front panel and a motherboard that can take a SCSI board. I don't suppose there will be many replies with the abundance of laptops these days. Just wondered if anyone has any thoughts on this. What make/model and where did you buy it from? Cheers.
I still feel that there is a place for desktop machines, thing is I always built my own, from way back in the mid 90's I just used to buy the parts and put it all together. These days if I had to buy something that was pre-built I would just recommend anything from Dell, you basically can't go wrong with them. I gave up on desktop's for home use because I was travelling back and forth to the Phils, and then I realised that using a docking station with my laptop, full size screen, full size keyboard gave me a desktop and a laptop at the same time so I'm not the best to advise on this. At work I have a Dell tower with front facing USB, I think they all have that these days, it would be pretty impossible to get a motherboard that could not take a SCSI card these days, SCSI cards have used standard interfaces for a very long time. What do you need the SCSI card for these days Mike, SATA is way up there with anything that SCSI could do 10 years back, as far as I know SCSI is only used in servers if that these days? Do you have to support an old legacy device? Actual examples you can get this without monitor for £209 http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-3...=cd64607&model_id=inspiron-3646-small-desktop but not sure it has the front facing ports, but at £209 new I would not be complaining There is little point nowadays in worrying too much about specs unless you are looking for a gaming machine, basically I would go for 8 GB of RAM (more than comes as standard at 209 quid above) 500 GB hard drive or spend a bit more for an SSD, 64 bit Windows 8.1 (you will get Windows 10 for free later this year which will be a big improvement) and probably an i5 processor which will be way quick enough for just about anything most people want to do.
Thanks for your reply as usual, Jim. I used to build desktops for myself also but back in 2001-2002 - networking pc's, printers etc. on 98, XP and 2000. Did a MSCE course in the States but didn't take the exams when I returned to the UK when I saw how low the salaries were with the influx of all the new I.T. students back then. I switched on an old "XP" tower the other day and there was no video out. The box was from 2001 so nothing lost as it is ancient now anyway. Yes, I have a Nikon Super Coolscan slide scanner and a SCSI card and want to scan thousands of slides. (These were from my oil business days stretching over 20 years). http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/scanner/scoolscan_2000/spec.htm This is why I have to get a desktop and hold off on the Lenovo laptop for a wee while. It would be nice to get the W520 laptop but I need to connect the SCSI scanner I have to get a desktop anyway for Chel's Facebook and the kids' education and they look at the laptop screen all the time now wanting to see videos of themselves all the time. We didn't even have cameras when we were kids This looked quite good: http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/deskt...ovo-h50-desktop-pc-10109070-pdt.html#longDesc The Lenovo website had 4GB more RAM but an inferior graphics card. John Lewis was £200 more but with an i7. The Dell is excellent for the money but looks like the SCSI board won't fit inside. Mike
The Nikon is a great scanner, I thought that might be why you needed SCSI, yeah if it is a full length board then it might not fit a small form factor motherboard. You can still build your own fairly easily, I used to get my parts from http://pless.co.uk/home.php but they are not as cheap as they once were, but there will be many other component suppliers out there these days. That Lenovo desktop looks like a good buy though, wasn't long ago that Lenovo overtook everyone to become the biggest PC manufacturer in the world.
Lenovo will probably be slipping in the rankings following the debacle over Superfish. It is a threat so serious that Lenovo rated the vulnerability 'high' on its website, yet because it caused the problem, Lenovo's CEO denied that Lenovo customers were at risk. The problem was that Lenovo self-signed root SSL Certificates so that it could inject adverts into HTTPS web pages. That alone was bad enough as it allowed Lenovo to spy on its customers during banking transactions etc. But it was worse than that. That self-signed SSL certificate has a very simple password - 7 character all lower case password 'komodia' (the name of the company that developed the software to inject the adverts into SSL pages) That password enables the extraction of the private key of the SSL certificate meaning that fraudsters could mount MITM attacks against many of Lenovo's laptop users - very dangerous if you are a Lenovo laptop user accessing your bank account! A very good reason for not buying a pre-built computer full of crapware!!!!!!!!
A good job I bought a Lenovo desktop PC http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31533028 Lenovo offers tool to remove hidden adware 'Superfish' http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31565368
I bought a Lenovo laptop recently, I checked through the BBC news website yesterday that I don't have Superfish installed. This goes back to my thread on preinstalled software, you don't really know what you're getting nowadays.
You know that PC's and laptops are still far more popular than tablets, tablets are great if all you want to do is consume entertainment, they are pretty useless when it comes to doing any real work that involves data input in moderate to large amounts.
The surface is a proper PC that can be used as a laptop and desktop replacement, you can't compare it to an iPad, the Surface is far far better.
