I want to buy a good value desktop PC.
Has anyone come across any sites to buy from?

Hi Frank

I find eBay quite good, lots of PCs and laptops available new, second-hand and refurbished generally at really good prices, might be worth a look.

Mike

buying pc's on eBay gives me the fear.
Although I have bought a good bit of electronics and optics
on eBay Mike, I generally as a rule wont spend more than
a hundred euro or there abouts on it.
I very nearly got caught last week when I tried to buy a
32g flash card.

After having a good look around the sites I'm tempted to just build my own!

PCs on ebay is very hit and miss, I've seen people been burnt and others with no hassle.
Be careful and stay away form deals that are too good to be true.

If you got the money, build one. From scratch to build your own PC (box-only, no peripherals) you could spend about €2.5K but it will last a good long time. Still got my beast going strong that I built in 2002, no reason to upgrade yet (and it has done imaging, music editing, Creative Suites and gaming) so I can't recommend this route enough.

Seanie.

2.5K would be for a seriously top end machine, I would have thought you could build a decent enough PC these days for 300-400e, its usually cheaper to build then to buy,
One thing thought I'd say is that some friends of mine that have bought dells recently say they're nothing but trouble, seems that their quality has decreased drastically since they moved east.
Its a pity to see what was a good brand going down, I own 2 dell machines, both about 5 years old and still going strong, but I wouldn't touch a new one...

Dave_Lillis wrote:

2.5K would be for a seriously top end machine, I would have thought you could build a decent enough PC these days for 300-400e, its usually cheaper to build then to buy

A mid to high-end motherboard could cost you €400-500 on its own! Then high speed/DDR RAM sticks could cost you €80-100 (2GB stick) each... it adds up!

Really??? I was thinking more like 100-150e, god that tells you how long its been since I bought a motherboard!

Holy smokes!
2.5K !?!?
No Way am I spending that!!

Seanie..
are you sure about these costs
or put it another way..
It's not a Cray I want to build here...

My budget is MAX 500 euro.
and for that I expect nothing but a top end machine in the end.
I've a few mates in the PC arena and they have built some seriously
impressive machines for this.

And now with the arse having fallen out of the world the
prices should surely be dropping!?

Well Frank, I believe in you get what you pay for. Allowing me to brag a bit, I bought an Asus Mobo, Kingston RAM, Intel Chips, an Inno 3D digital AGP, 2 Western Digital HD's with a RAID system. Add various other extras such as the tower case with 5 bays composing of 2 DVD burners, Creative Audigy digital soundcard, a removable backup drive and see all of it STILL running unburdened to this day, seeing an average of 30 hours a week BEFORE I moved my work out of home and an average of 60 hours a week before that, all since 2002, it IS worth the money...

Some of the best hardware today has been unaffected by the recession price-wise, so you do have to be a little shrewd on what you want to by to match its purpose.

I believe €500 will get you an Aldi/Lidl machine - case with 2 bays, 1HD, 4GB of RAM, standard DuoCore Mobo, no extras...



...or a Dell!

Impressive setup there Seanie, but I wonder is that too high a spec for what Frank wants.
Frank, have you had a look at komplett.ie
or dabs.ie

Nope but I will thanks.
Seanie, nice machine and nice price tag too!
You do indeed get what you pay for but
I'm gonna hunt down as best as I can get
For my 500.

Frank - also have a look at Elara (Irish). Pretty much same as Komplett but probably without the shipping charges. I've bought from both and been happy.

As far as the PC goes, I honestly think that for 500 snots you're going to get a pretty basic machine. Now, if that's what you want, then happy days.

Like Seanie, I built a high spec machine - probably around 4K a few years back. Probably half that price today. But I had specific requirements - the most important being data storage and integrity. I have 10 hard disks in use with 4 spares (these are backups that are stored off-site). In order to achieve that, my money had to go on a good tower case, a good power supply, a suitable MOBO, a NAS box and a bucket load of hard disks. That's where the majority of the cash went.

Have a good think about what you need the PC for. If its light tasks, you're not worried too much about data loss and you can put up with it being sluggish, then 500 should do it.

HTH
Dave

Hey Frank, whether you go for build or buy, the recovery of Sterling is such that you'll still benefit from a daytrip up North, though not quite as much as you would have a year ago. have a look at pcworld.co.uk - if they have what you want at the right price then you'll do fine, but don't count on top quality advice!

Paul.

Dont forget out of the €500 you will probably need an operating system, thats prob about the €200 mark!

You might get away without having a monitor if you have a HDTV and have a HDMI Output on the Graphics card. otherwise thats another €250 for a small decent one (new).

Not much left to kit out a computer!

Im not sure how easy it would be or even possible but what about buying a Dell then upgrading it on the cheap? more ram, faster CPU (sell old one), Big Graphics card?

Graham

I picked up a fairly decent enough PC not too long ago secondhand on www.adverts.ie for 150euro. More than enough for an observatory PC.

As for www.komplett.ie I am having quite a difficult time with them at the moment. I recommend you read boards.ie to see what is going on there. Suffice to say, I would recommend you steer clear of them - a pity as they used to be very good.

Michael.

i have used www.dabs.ie and found them quite good and reasonbly priced. if you are building pc you should look out for and oem version of the operating system. if you get it you'd have to buy it with hardware such as ram or a video card but it is a third the price usually of the full thing. the drawback is that you can only use it on one computer once you activate it. it is not easy to transfer to another computer as if you change too much of the hardware it has a fit.
stephen.

And on that OS question - Ubuntu is free and very capable - I recently upgraded my laptop by changing the 120GB disk for a 320GB and didn't bother replicating the previous Vista / Ubuntu dual boot, I just went for Ubuntu. No regrets thus far!

michaeloconnell wrote:

I picked up a fairly decent enough PC not too long ago secondhand on www.adverts.ie for 150euro. More than enough for an observatory PC.

Exactly and why all this worry about an OS, surely Frank you have a windows CD from your old pc??

michaeloconnell wrote:

As for www.komplett.ie I am having quite a difficult time with them at the moment. I recommend you read boards.ie to see what is going on there. Suffice to say, I would recommend you steer clear of them - a pity as they used to be very good.
Michael.

Thats a pity, I bought plenty of memory over the years off them and they were always ok, never had to return anything to them so dont know what they are like for that.

also, have a look at pixmania
www.pixmania.ie/ie/uk/bts-computing.html

Ha! I wouldn't buy from pixmania either unfortunately.
Bought a digital camera from them. Camera had to be returned and it was a painful experience. Trying to fill in Return Forms which are in French was only the start of it. After sending it back at our own expense, it arrived back in the same broken condition even though they claimed they had it fixed.
Will be staying local in future unfortunately.
Michael.

jezz Michael, you're abit like the black death when it comes to internet purchasing

Jeez lads ye Invest some serious cash in pc's!
I've only recently (3years ago) bought a new
Laptop. Toshiba Satellite. And I ended up taking vista off it
And installing an old version of xp on it.
Aside from not being able to use it for astrophotography
(my old 15" VRT beats hands down the 17" LCD
On the Tosh for processing. Though the Tosh died on me a few weeks ago due to a cheapo power cable)
In fact, I now use an old Dell Dimension laptop, with a broken power jack so it's permanently sitting in a docking station,
Connected to an old VRT sat on top (the Dell screen is bust also but that's ok coz I want to use the VRT anyway)
And that laptop is as basic as they come!
I've all my images stored on a 500G ex HD
and back up every week to a second drive.
I find that even though my main work machine
Looks like some Borg misshap it does me fine.

The PC I'm actually replacing is an 11 year old Dell
Dimension desktop. (I still use this pc in
My
Stained glass studio) but I want a good decent all rounder for the house.

Then for 500 euro you should get a decent machine for home use. Just bought a Samsung R580 laptop last weekend for ariund that price and its overkill for most applications including astrophotography (Core i5, 640 GB disk, 4GB ram etc....)

Dave_Lillis wrote:

jezz Michael, you're abit like the black death when it comes to internet purchasing

michaeloconnell wrote:

Ha! I wouldn't buy from pixmania either unfortunately.
Bought a digital camera from them. Camera had to be returned and it was a painful experience. Trying to fill in Return Forms which are in French was only the start of it. After sending it back at our own expense, it arrived back in the same broken condition even though they claimed they had it fixed.
Will be staying local in future unfortunately.
Michael.

I bought my Canon 450D from Pixmania. The camera arrived in perfect nick and it was a real bargain -but it tooks weeks before it arrived. I would dread the thought of having to go through a product return.
I bought my last two PCs from on special offers from Currys and Harvey Normans. Any problems, just bring them into the store with the receipt and the prices were close to internet prices anyway.