Desktop pc cheap as chips?

Mumstheword

arriva wrote: »

I bought one of those zoostorm PCs from ebuyer a couple of weeks ago and I have to say they are not as good as they seem. Good value for the money, it has potentials but as it is delivered it is not that great.

TakeThis wrote: »

here is a refurb with an OS, for £185.

jbainbridge wrote: »

If you're really strapped consider ... something off Ebay. I regularly buy used HP business desktops. Have a search for 'HP dc7900'. Make sure it has a 3GHz core2duo and 2GB of ram. You should get a good example for less than 150, maybe 100. They are solid and quiet. Worth a go?

Thank you all again!!

Closed - thanks for your offer to help with the logs etc. I may take you up on that again (you've looked at it once for me I think) if I give this old machine to my son to 'play' aka learn!! with. It's a very old machine as far as i can tell. It was an office skip rescue which my ex made up again to be of use. It's even got an old fashioned disc drive. But I know age shouldnt hamper it's performance. I really do think theres always been something pants about it, despite you and ex and others attempting to get it useful.

Arriva, thanks for your views. Its very useful to speak to someone who will honestly review something theyve bought. Many wont be as honest so I am really grateful for that review.

Take This - that looks like a good idea. Not much lower spec (I dont need 1TB or even 500Gb anyway!!) but it has an OS already installed which would save messing and worrying about whether things will work/drivers etc. Do you know of that company? Whether they have a good reputation?

Which leads me on to JBainbridge - thank you so much for finding that link for me. I worry about buying such things from ebay. Not sure why - they could be a more reputable company than the one above, who ever knows!


What does anyone think of Take This's suggestion? It looks good to me, altho I'm such an amateur I dont know! Can anyone say what score it would get in those comparable numbers (the ones in the 2,000s?)

Thank you thank you thank you - good advice is worth so much.

Mumstheword

I've also just realised that Take This's suggestion is not far from where I live - so no delivery problems, I could go to the shop!

TakeThis

Mumstheword wrote: »

I've also just realised that Take This's suggestion is not far from where I live - so no delivery problems, I could go to the shop!

It also has the highest processor score of the lot...2563, if such things are important.
Perhaps they'll let you take a look before purchase. Plus you'll save £14.99.

Mumstheword

Thanks for that 'score' Take This. Hmmm....IF such things are important?? Lol, I've no idea really apart from thinking that might make it faster?? Help lol!!

Mumstheword

Cant believe my (bad) luck - it was on the website last night. I was setting off to the shop within the hour..... but it's now out of stock! Gutted!

GunJack

you could contact them/pop in there anyway, see if they've got similar spec/price in stock

Mumstheword

Thanks Gunjack, I phoned them but just got a girl who didnt know what was what lol! A bit like me, altho I'm learning!! They have some others on there for £230. Someone showed me where to get the CPU scores from, and the ones they have score around the 2000 mark, whereas that one was about 2500, that seems quite a difference?

gonzo127

Mumstheword wrote: »

Thanks Gunjack, I phoned them but just got a girl who didnt know what was what lol! A bit like me, altho I'm learning!! They have some others on there for £230. Someone showed me where to get the CPU scores from, and the ones they have score around the 2000 mark, whereas that one was about 2500, that seems quite a difference?

Well this is where it can get a little confusing as this is not necessarily true.

so I will try and keep this simple, now of course you will have heard all the marketing talk about duel/tri/quad core processors, now this tells you how ‘brains’ (the cores) it has to allow for multi tasking – this all seems very clever and of course the bigger number the better yes? Well not always.

As when running a program, in most instances, you will only need to do one intensive bit of ‘thinking’ at a time, so the extra core’s will actually be sat there doing very little – ok there are programs out there which have been made to use more than one core at a time however a lot still don’t use more than 1.

And one of the limiting factors in electronics is heat, and a processor with 4 cores will have been designed to have to cope with, and get rid of, the heat produced from all 4 cores running at 100% which usually means each core has to be a bit slower than, for example something with less cores, say only having 2 cores, so these could run a bit faster as the extra heat produced from running them faster would be easier to get rid off since you only have 2 cores worth of heat to deal with and not 4.

Now the benchmarks, although very helpful, are designed to test a processor in as wide a range of situations as possible, and this includes testing on programs which will use all the cores a processor has, and this in itself can be a little bit misleading, as you would very much expect a processor with 4 cores to score a lot higher on the multi core parts of the tests than a duel core processor, however when it comes to a program which only uses one core most of the time (such as web browsing, office programs, games etc) then you might find that the duel core processor is actually better at these tasks since they are usually designed with slightly faster cores, just less of them.

How to get around this is of course gets difficult and there is no real fail safe way of comparing them to take this into account without reading the reviews and all the detail behind the benchmarks of the processors

So the message of this post, don’t automatically discount a system because the benchmark is lower, if you don’t want to go through the benchmarks just popst the specs and we will of course give you our opinions

TakeThis

Mumstheword wrote: »

Cant believe my (bad) luck - it was on the website last night. I was setting off to the shop within the hour..... but it's now out of stock! Gutted!

It's not bad luck. Once it was posted and recommended here, it was just a matter of time.

I'm surprised they lasted that long.

TakeThis

gonzo127 wrote: »

Well this is where it can get a little confusing as this is not necessarily true.

so I will try and keep this simple, now of course you will have heard all the marketing talk about duel/tri/quad core processors, now this tells you how ‘brains’ (the cores) it has to allow for multi tasking – this all seems very clever and of course the bigger number the better yes? Well not always.

As when running a program, in most instances, you will only need to do one intensive bit of ‘thinking’ at a time, so the extra core’s will actually be sat there doing very little – ok there are programs out there which have been made to use more than one core at a time however a lot still don’t use more than 1.

And one of the limiting factors in electronics is heat, and a processor with 4 cores will have been designed to have to cope with, and get rid of, the heat produced from all 4 cores running at 100% which usually means each core has to be a bit slower than, for example something with less cores, say only having 2 cores, so these could run a bit faster as the extra heat produced from running them faster would be easier to get rid off since you only have 2 cores worth of heat to deal with and not 4.

Now the benchmarks, although very helpful, are designed to test a processor in as wide a range of situations as possible, and this includes testing on programs which will use all the cores a processor has, and this in itself can be a little bit misleading, as you would very much expect a processor with 4 cores to score a lot higher on the multi core parts of the tests than a duel core processor, however when it comes to a program which only uses one core most of the time (such as web browsing, office programs, games etc) then you might find that the duel core processor is actually better at these tasks since they are usually designed with slightly faster cores, just less of them.

How to get around this is of course gets difficult and there is no real fail safe way of comparing them to take this into account without reading the reviews and all the detail behind the benchmarks of the processors

So the message of this post, don’t automatically discount a system because the benchmark is lower, if you don’t want to go through the benchmarks just popst the specs and we will of course give you our opinions

The problem here I suspect is not the CPU benchmark, but the considerably higher prices for what appears to be lesser machines. At £230, that would be £50 more than my initial recommendation.