recession pc's how to guide.

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Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

During hard times when a pc breaks down you need a quick cheap alternative.

PC AMD athlon x2 250 - £20
Motherboard Asus - £15
HDD - WD 750GB green £50
Case Style king £16 (comes with 420w psu)
DVD drive - use broken pc
You will need a second sata power lead - £2.99
You will need ram - Corsair Xtreme DDR 800mhz - £29.99 (4GB)
OS - run linux. (or retail windows 7)

total: £134

obviously for that price its not a high end pc, but surprisingly its not low end or entry level either.
If you also added a 1TB ATI HD5460 card £39 its just entering game level, this means it will play most games (check amd compatible)

Its cheap enough to get you out of a costly repair (although 134 is some major repair works to be honest.) But its powerful enough to bring you to next summer, which gives ya plenty of time to save some pennies to get a better high end machine which are dropping in price like rocks atm.

Tips when buying a PC
If your just baiting and browsing watching the odd youtube etc, all you need is this or a 199-299 range box.
If you like to video edit 399-799 boxes (check in store, some do better than others.)
If your a keen gamer then 899 - 1200. You dont need to spend more than that on a top of the range pc.

Also where possible try to NEVER pay the display price, just because it says £599 does not mean they will have no choice but to sell for that price. Nearly every pc ive sold over the years the customer bartered lol, and every pc ive bought i bartered for it too.
If they wont reduce the price get them to throw in something useful to you. if you like games - ask for a game, if you do more office work get a printer.

Tips on printers:
Printers cost £29.99 - £1000's depending on what you buy.
A monotone laser printer may cost £99 but the refil could be £89,
lasers are in general more economical than inkjets, but check things like the kodak easyshare range where black in is only £10. (the downside to the kodaks is after a relatively short time the drum needs replacing inside, they get ya every way lol, but now ya know what to be looking for. If it costs nearly the same for a refil you will be better of buying a new printer instead lol, and in the uk the shop has to dump your old one. (its not actually economical to really buy a new one instead of refils, but its almost)

Printers to avoid - some colour lasers, they sell for £149, but you spend 91.99 for B,Y,R,C thats nearly 400 quid.

If you have an existing laser, cartridge refill shops may be a good place you can save cash, and theres euro stores for compatibles bringing costs down too - although ive had mixed results with compatibles, shorter page runs like some orig do 5000 (or in reality about 2700 if you fill the page with text) with compatibles its slightly less rated 5000 but you get about 2200, a realm difference.

To get the parts listed above your local pc store should have them as standard stock, or maplins etc.

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 6:34 am

Can I report the above as spam? Very Happy

All I need now is the £134 Crying or Very sad

And the ability to build it, then work out how to use it.

Good thinking though D11 Very Happy

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 9:03 am

irishemigrant wrote:

All I need now is the £134 Crying or Very sad

At Beautiful Ebony we will pay up to.....

No,

wait,

sorry,

bait mode..........

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 10:19 am

D11 wrote:

(..)

total: £134

(..)

That's about what I've paid for my PC at home. Got all the pieces from eBay, and some from company left over stuff (including OS). Works great.

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 1:37 pm

Quote:

Also where possible try to NEVER pay the display price,

Quite right about that. In contract law classes we were told that we can (and should) dicker over the posted price.

Most Americans however just look at the price and pay it because most people do not know they could ask the sales associate to lower the price, however that hinges on finding a sales associate who understands that the listed price is only the "suggested" price. Even asking to speak to the manager doesn't always work because the store manager has not given them the green light to "adjust" a price. Yet, folks will try to dicker if buying a car!

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 1:42 pm

@D11 do you carry Blackberry Storm brand new unlock simfree? Also iPad 3?

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

bohigal, im not selling anything, i worked in the trade for the past 20 years, im just sharing knowledge of cheap bits of kit to get ppl out of a bind, where you source them is upto you, it wont suit everyone of course, no single pc ever could, but at that price for bits it aint too bad Very Happy

As for the ipad3 you could try dreams hehehe they sell beds and you could dream about an ipad 3 on them hehehe. For the blackberry i never sold phones, but you could try a phone lad you have more chance of that kit with them lol Wink

only j/k of course, lads only sell upto 9499 not 9500 Smile

(and if the ipad 3 when it comes out is anything like the ipad2, (side screen bleed etc, your probably better off with the motorola offering.)

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 11:51 pm

D11 is right - regular stuff will run just fine on that spec, or a lot less if you're careful. I had a 1.7ghz laptop with a 60gb hdd and 1gb memory for 6 years, replacing it with a better one when the video card died. It was still ok performance wise at the end of its life.

Until the frost killed it a year ago I also had a 1ghz Pentium machine doing the very important job of driving a 3,000 lb, 3KW CNC milling machine. It was simple and stable and as good as it needed to be. It's music and games that eat up drive space and processor capacity, not productivity software.

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

@ irish building it isnt hard - even a cat could do it...

several dozen hidden treats later...

The cat was smart read the manual first hehehe

then theres the actual building

Baiting Guru Joined: 31 Jan 2007 Posts: 12237

D11 wrote:

£

This is all based on the Metric System, beware.

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

@pf thats correct its in GBP.

However, in usa the same parts depending where sourced are not too far off that either, cpu on ebay $25

Baiting Guru Joined: 31 Jan 2007 Posts: 12237

I suppose you are unaware about how I feel about the Metric System. No worries folks, D11 is credible.

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:41 am

Lovely cat :3

older PCs can be had dirt cheap on Ebay or FOC Freecycle. Probably worth buying new HDDs though as they are what my old IT guy referred to as a "temporary luxury".

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 11:20 am

Although if you're up to building a pc, you can repair the old one for less than that.

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