Currys Compaq PC, 160GB, not 3Ghz, 512Mb RAM, DVD ReWriter, £399

decanay

I have to disagree with tr3mor on this one; I think that if your currently running a pc older than 3 years (how long have you had yours) and without windows xp (you didn't say if you were or not) then you really would notice a difference.

I personally have a 1Ghz 128ram 30gig hdd pc running XP and it's not much fun to use. I also have one I built myself recently for £250 with similar spec to that Medion that runs almost infinitely faster.

To answer your question about the Medion in Woolworths, it looks ok but I think you could probably get a better spec for under £400 from Dell or others mentioned earlier. It also looks like the monitor is beige and the rest of the system is black, very odd.

welche2

Currys Compaq PC, 160GB, not 3Ghz, 512Mb RAM, DVD ReWriter, £399


my sister got this computer yesterday. been playing on it tried to create a restarter disk on a dvd the computer would not reconise the dvd+r disk even thought the compaq program asking 4 this type. no windows xp disk only the software on the comuter.
this is there 1st computer they have ever had. got a spare bay 4 a new dvd/cd drive slow eject on drd writer the pc is slower than my 2.5 gig packard bell which is 2yrs old. now with 528mb ram there's shows only 448mb ram and only 145gig hard drive on system settings where is the 512mb and 160 gig hard drive even when windows is installed and formated ntts stlye it should be more than 145g of hard drive space . 14 inch monitor, cheap keyboard does not come with pc speakers. for muti media bad deal i think havent the heart to tell them. as they have saved up 4 the last 6 months to get one

Stephen_Webber

the Sempron rating of 3000 is equivalent to the old Athlon (it's the speed the old Athlon would have to run at to be as fast as the Sempron). AMD's run at a slower clock speed than Intels, but that is not a problem as they work more efficiently. Only the Intel marketing hype has people believe they must buy a faster processor. In fact, the Intel mobile processors in laptops are as fast as the current pentiums but run at similar speeds to the AMD processors.

As a general rule of thumb, AMD processors are normally faster for all but video editing work.

welche2, some of the system memory is being used for the graphics display, which us why only 448 is showing as available. The only way to get back this "missing" 64MB would be to install a seperate graphics card with its own dedicated memory.

Regards,
Stephen

TaBunny

albertross wrote:

Tabunny's query has been posted to the techy board as well..

I wasn't aware we weren't allowed to post something in more than one place, my thoughts were that not everyone may look at every board so I had the idea to copy it to another board as well, sorry if this is prohibited I'm sure it never used to be. Anyway and re specs etc I know all old comps used to be slow and have lower specs etc but I recently forked out quite a bit of money for an anti virus cd and it wouldn't load because it kept saying I needed a minimum of 130mb ram which as I said before I dont have. Anyway many thanks to all who helped.

zobozoz

You can buy the compaq 1609 from currys for £289.00 without the monitor,

tr3mor

decanay wrote:

I have to disagree with tr3mor on this one; I think that if your currently running a pc older than 3 years (how long have you had yours) and without windows xp (you didn't say if you were or not) then you really would notice a difference.

I personally have a 1Ghz 128ram 30gig hdd pc running XP and it's not much fun to use. I also have one I built myself recently for £250 with similar spec to that Medion that runs almost infinitely faster.

Seriously, try upping the RAM (and extra 512 to give you 640), turning all the fancy visual effects in XP off, turn system restore off, and stop things loading at start up using msconfig. Then laugh at all the people who buy Packard Bell PCs full of bloatware for thrice the price they should be that can't run a thing!

decanay

tr3mor wrote:

Seriously, try upping the RAM (and extra 512 to give you 640), turning all the fancy visual effects in XP off, turn system restore off, and stop things loading at start up using msconfig. Then laugh at all the people who buy Packard Bell PCs full of bloatware for thrice the price they should be that can't run a thing!

As I have no need to get that system running, (currently have 4 desktops + a laptop in the house) I am not going to spend any money on it (£67 for 512mb of old pc133 seems a bit steep to me).

You probably are right about getting a decent boost from extra RAM, but most of my PC's are used for multimedia creation and web development which both require far more processing power than this system could provide.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

tr3mor

decanay wrote:

As I have no need to get that system running, (currently have 4 desktops + a laptop in the house) I am not going to spend any money on it (£67 for 512mb of old pc133 seems a bit steep to me).

You probably are right about getting a decent boost from extra RAM, but most of my PC's are used for multimedia creation and web development which both require far more processing power than this system could provide.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

You're welcome to chuck it this way

Aria do 512megs of pc133 for £31 too.

SandLake

"You can buy the compaq 1609 from currys for £289.00 without the monitor"

I don't see that option on the website, was it in store?

decanay

tr3mor wrote:

Aria do 512megs of pc133 for £31 too.

Thanks, that’s less than half the price Crucial are charging for theirs. If only it was in stock, I may upgrade.

I'm going to place an ad in the local paper, see if I can make anything from it. If not, you’re welcome to it.