[ubuntu-uk] Some PC builder advice please
Michael Wood
admin at x3n.me.uk
Mon Oct 30 22:47:38 GMT 2006
Hi,
My father bought a Mesh last year, good spec Athlon64 3500 250GB SATA
1GB Ram* * NVIDIA GeForce 6??0 Graphics.
But it ended up running very slow under windows and has had multiple
boot problems, XP professional has been reinstalled multiple times, it
now has ubuntu on it which runs ok so far (hasn't been on there for
long) and the latest reinstall of XP seems to be ok to date.
The support desk drones don't have much useful to say on anything. There
was also a hardware issue with motherboard fan (northbridge) which had
to be replaced. It took quite a while because when they finally came
they brought the wrong fan.
The cost of act of replacing the fan - A guy in a van coming out 30
miles with the wrong £1 fan + the cost of coming out a couple of days
later with the correct fan must have been enormous. You might ask why I
didn't just replace it, well warranties are a double edged sword sometimes.
Overall I wouldn't recommend them. But I always build my own PCs and I
really don't have much faith in any pre-built systems, as they often use
components that I wouldn't rate. Like Maxtor hard drives which have a
notoriously high failure rate. The cases are also very cheap and
difficult to upgrade the components inside without changing cases e.g.
adding a hard drive. You also often only get 1 PCI/E slot on the
motherboard making it impossible to add more expansion cards.
That aside, if you can't see yourself ever needing to open the case of
the machine I would look at Dell, HP, Philips, acer and maybe some
people like komplett.
--
/\/\ichael [ X3N ]
\/\/ood [ http://michaelwood.me.uk ]
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