PC for OAP!

Spilt_Milk

Hi all,

My grandad needs a new PC and he has a budget of abour £400.

He uses it mainly for digital photography. He is a keen photographer and recently went all digital. He uses the PC mainly for just getting his pics off his camera and then on to Cd or printer.

Can anyone reccomend any suitable brands?

My main thought is really chossing someone who is going to have good tech support. If it goes wrong he doesnt have the know how to go through things over the phone etc.

Any help much appreciated.

Mark_LJ

I appreciate that this is £99 above budget but it ticks all the boxes and more. If he's doing photo's then minimum ram should be 512mb. An internal card reader is a must to save on the camera batteries. A good bit of space on the hard drive - this has 160gb. A nice DVD burner to back up the photo's and to top it off its got a 19" TFT. Its also got a 3 year warranty as well.

newfoundglory

hmm... a mac?

Dammam

I'd be tempted to go to a local independant outfit with a good word-of-mouth reputation. PC World and the like will sell you a good spec machine at a good price, but I'm not convinced by their after sales support.
Something along the lines of a Sempron CPU with a PC Chips motherboard, 512mb of memory, a functional case and a dvd writer along with an 80gig hard drive and basic graphics card (assuming he's not going to be playing too many arcade games).
If he has room, a reconditioned 17" monitor would cost around £35, a nice photo quality printer (Epson & Canon are probably cheapest to run with 3rd party inks) would cost between £60 & £100.

Hmmmm - taking a look through the above, you're probably looking at between £350 and £450, although he'll get a system suited to his needs. I suppose if he can get a system for £400 from PC World he would also get a copy of Windows included in the price, which can make a difference.
Bear in mind that any printer included in a cheap deal would probably not satisfy a keen photographer, and the replacement ink would probably cost as much as the printer! (e.g Lexmark).

Sorry - I've probably added more confusion rather than point you in one particular direction!

Dammam

That Mesh computer from MarkLJ is a veritable bargain. Mesh have a good reputation - not sure what their support is like as it's a mail order company, but you'd be hard pushed to build anything to that spec for the same price.

matty_c608

Ensure you get an Epson Printer, for dirt cheap cartridges (less than a £1 per colour cartridge)

stewbie_2

Mesh - good kit - good prices - great after sales service and support

Evesham - good kit - good prices - great after sales service and support

Dell - good kit - good prices - reasonable after sales service and support

Dabs - mostly good kit - mostly great prices - some superb prices - poor pre and post sales support

Morgan - mixture of good / average kit - good prices if you don't mind either re-furbished or end-of-line stocks - service unknown - haven't needed it to-date

PC World / Dixons / Currys - any member of the Dixons Thieving Ba***rds Retail Group - Some good kit - some good prices - occasional reasonable service but mostly poor - Packard Bell is their own brand - go in looking for an Apple Mac and they'll try to sell you PB - they get way more commission on PB because of the margins (according to a PC World Manager)

Tiny / Time etc - No No No No No!!!!!

Get something where you get good customer service - Techies like me can fight their way through the poor service - less technically aware, need someone who will help them make their new PC a useful piece of kit - not an expensive curse

Good luck!

pchelpman

stewbie wrote:

Dell - good kit - good prices - reasonable after sales service and support

....my experience says otherwise. Maybe I just meet unlucky poeple.

Dell's after sales support is dreadful....not available at weekends, for example, unless they've changed their habits.

Luckily I don't need support any more but, when I did, Dell didn't help much.

As to the kit, well, yes it's cheap but, if you try to do anything to the insides like add a new CD drive, it's a nightmare due to the way Dell's PCs are put together on their "custom designed" basis.

Personally, I'd go somewhere else. As suggested before go somewhere with a good reputation. Possibly a small independant supplier but be careful there too.....no support if the seller goes out of business.

stewbie_2

pchelpman wrote:

....my experience says otherwise. Maybe I just meet unlucky poeple.

Dell's after sales support is dreadful....not available at weekends, for example, unless they've changed their habits.

Luckily I don't need support any more but, when I did, Dell didn't help much.

I'd agree with you wholeheartedly about two to three years ago - even though we had over 700 Dell PC's, I'd get one of my PC technicians to call them about a faulty hard drive or motherboard and their support would be doing the "Is the power cable plugged in and switched on?" script stuff - So I would never recommend them for home users, but in the last couple of years, Dell have been focussing on the home market and so far the people I know have had nothing but good things to say....

pchelpman wrote:

As to the kit, well, yes it's cheap but, if you try to do anything to the insides like add a new CD drive, it's a nightmare due to the way Dell's PCs are put together on their "custom designed" basis.

This actually applies to all manufacturers.... unless you are buying something that looks like it has free bays for adding drives or cards etc, the chances are that it doesn't - especially when it comes to the sorts of small-form factor PCs that are being punted at the consumer market.

pchelpman wrote:

Personally, I'd go somewhere else. As suggested before go somewhere with a good reputation. Possibly a small independant supplier but be careful there too.....no support if the seller goes out of business.

Id agree completely with you about going somewhere with a good reputation... ask friends where they got theirs, and what the support has been like...

The biggest warning would be: beware small PC shops / independents

Some of them are absolutely fantastic - really useful and helpful making solid kit at good prices, but on the whole, they tend to be exactly the same as that garage down the road who said that they had to change you fizz-pop thingummy which cost 300 quid and took them 8 chargeable hours to change, when in-fact all they did was change the oil filter and and swap the existing fizz-pop thingummy for the one they took out of the last punter's car.

This might sound a bit harsh, but it's based on personal experience picking up the pieces for friends and colleagues from Aberdeen to Southampton.

A classic example of this would be the Doctor (nr Edinburgh), who had important research notes that he'd been writing up for six or seven months on his Toshiba Portege laptop, and hadn't been backing up.

He managed to fall for one of those interesting emails from a friend that tells you to delete files from your PC because they are part of a new and undiscovered virus, which actually stuffs your PC up.

The local computer wizard who took the job on basically did no more than use the Toshiba product recovery disk to re-build the machine - when the doc asked about the data on the disk, he was told that the wiz had done everything he could to recover his data, and to remember that the document he signed when he gave them the laptop said that he couldn't be held accountable for any lost data.

Curiously there were an awful lot of chargeable hours involved.

The model of laptop that the doc used has a little flap - you can unscrew
and then just pull the hard disk out of - bung it on a usb / hdd interface, copy the data off then put it back in to re-build the machine.

This kind of thing is as common with local PC Gurus and Wizards as it is with local garages - some are good - some aren't

Fraserca

I agree with PCHELPMAN - I used to run a local independent comuter shop. We gave tremendous help to customers personally and had a list of PC tutors who gave tuition at home separately from us.

You will get far more help from someone in a shop who actually built or specified the computer for you, knows the machine and has encountered similar problems before. Its common sense that someone in a call centre will not be in touch so much with your needs.

BTW - a small independent may be able to update the old machine economically - Does he need a new monitor - if not then that can save quite a lot

A list of Independent retailers can be found here

http://www.nascr.net/members.php?TB=home1

Edinburghlass_2

A classic example of this would be the Doctor (nr Edinburgh), who had important research notes that he'd been writing up for six or seven months on his Toshiba Portege laptop, and hadn't been backing up.

Should that Doc (nr Edinburgh) ever need help again I can certainly recommend my local pc guy who has helped me and upgraded my systems for years

He has "built" to my needs and is always available on the end of the phone should any problems arise and is quite happy to help me sort it out myself without charge if I can.