[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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