Julie's Boggle

After suffering through quite a lot of low-key chafing about my slow computer, the Minister for Finance (aka Tom) eventually came round to the idea that we could start looking at upgrading my hardware!

In the past, we’ve always practised home computer engineering. Building new machines and upgrading old ones by buying individual components. But these days, the prices on complete boxes is competitive enough, and the strain of matching up the components is severe enough, that we just decided to go straight for an off-the-shelf machine.

So Sunday afternoon found us at the large Brentford branch of PCWorld. “Just looking”! Our primary target was their ‘Bargain Bin’, where PC’s that are ex-display or have damaged packaging go to be sold off cheaply.

The long and short of it was that we discovered NONE of the machines they had on offer came with XP Professional, which is the OS that I wanted. They were fairly explicit in their “no can do” on that one (all machines come with XP Home). :huh:

However, the enterprising sales guy was happy to direct us to their PCWorld “Business” (PCWB) arm – a purely online service aimed at businesses. We were clearly home users but that didn’t seem to be a problem.

Armed with a bundle of extra info, we trotted off home to do some more research. We were trying to stay fairly low-budget so Tom changed his sights from the AMD 64bit to a regular Pentium 4 which made a fair old saving. More looking around and it turned out that the one from PCWB was actually pretty good price-wise and met our specs fairly well.

So in the end, the reason that we actually bought the identical machine from their competitor DABS instead, is because PCWorld Business are completely inflexible! They won’t deliver to any address other than the credit card billing address (“to prevent fraud”). Unless you set up an account with them, for which you DO have to be a business.

So how on earth are we supposed to buy a machine with XP Pro on it from these guys then?!?

But all that is water under the bridge now. My new PC arrived the very next day from DABS.

Of course I then had to get the almighty 12kg box home with me on the Underground… And the only catch with that scheme was that scant hours before I left for the day, the Central Line became the “Extremities Only” Line when they closed all the stations in Zone 1 and 2. (“Person under a train” at Marble Arch.) Making the whole affair that much more entertaining…

I offer all that as my excuse for a lack of entries lately. The business of re-installing all my applications has been rather time-consuming and is still ongoing. But in the meanwhile, I am enjoying significant speed improvements!