WillWybrow.com

As promised, here is a list of specs for you all to go “wow that looks cool” or “ah man, why’d you get that shitty thing?”

• Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition (Quad core, 3.0GHz)
• RAM: 8GB Dual-channel DDR2
• Graphics Card: ATi Radeon HD 4870 1024MB

That’s the essentials, I guess. I could give you the model of my motherboard or the capacity of my hard-drives but they’re much more boring.

Hope you all followed the excitement this morning/afternoon on Twitter — unless you were all too fucking distracted by the weather.

Tower Complete

This is the bomb site of my bedroom about three hours after the DHL man came and gave me three boxes. Blogging from the laptop right now as I’m still setting up software. Not even got to Office yet. Wow, Windows!

02/02

Hello, internet. I wanted to ask you something quickly.

Is £1100 too much to spend on one thing? I got this idea for a computer, right, and this is how I am going to start things off. This includes everything – I’m not recycling any part of the inside of my current computer, and the only peripherals I am keeping a hold of are the mouse (because I’ve grown accustomed to this one) and speakers (because I’m not a musicfag who gives a shit about how stuff sounds). New hard drives, new optical drives, a new monitor and a new keyboard.

This being the case, I’ve looked to get all my things from one source – this minimises any postage overheads and ensures that all my stuff arrives at the same time, which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a good thing. Looking around at comparable items or the same items in different online stores, £1100 is a standard guide for what I’m looking for.

Because I’m not recycling anything, money has to be spent on a monitor and case and PSU and those kinds of things. Now, a big monitor is nice but expensive. It takes funds out of the ‘performance’ pile and puts them into the ‘looks’ pile. It’s a shame, but hopefully a 24-inch monitor will last long enough for it to be worthwhile.

I’ll publish confirmed specs soon.

PEE CEE WOOORLD!!!

Hm, I got back earlier from a friend’s house. CJ messaged me telling me his laptop screen was broken, and he had an essay to write. I took my spare 15-inch TFT monitor over to his house to help him out, but it turns out that more than the screen wasn’t working. Never mind. We’re going PC shopping soon!

It was a passing suggestion that we check out some actual shops. While I don’t mind browsing shops (in fact, looking at a shelf of toys is better than an index page where you click, go back, click and go back), they are dreadfully… expensive.

As a little example of how badly computer shops rape you on the price (because they know if you’re in the shop, you probably aren’t interested in/able to shop online), I bought two kettle leads today (the standard shape power cord that goes into the back of your PC or kitchen kettle) on eBay for 99p each. Free postage.

Some years ago (and I struggle to remember how long exactly, but in the vicinity of four or five), my dad and I went to see one of my dad’s former colleagues to give her (she was an older lady) her first home PC. It was excess to requirements at home. I think it sported a 233MHz Pentium processor, and 3GB of hard drive space. Windows 98. Anyway, we either didn’t have spare power cords or forgot to pack them up, so we drove to the nearest computer shop (this was many miles from home, impossible to go home and bring them back in a reasonable time) to pick some up. One for the base unit, one for the monitor. How much did we pay? I’ll give you a moment to guess. Go on, think about it.

When we left the shop (a PC World), we had parted with fifteen pounds and ninety-eight pence. Each of those 99p cords set us back £8. Now, assuming this eBay user is making no profit (false, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose). This means the PC World markup was 700%. Now obviously this doesn’t hold for everything; if you were paying eight times the internet price for a laptop, you’d be forking out thousands, and nobody would buy them. But on the little things where nobody necessarily knows better, such as USB cables or blank CDs, the price difference is alarming.

I picture the markup of computer components as somewhere in between the staggeringly large and relatively small differences I’ve described. Probably not as ridiculous as eight times the going online rate, but certainly enough to make me never even consider buying from them, or anyone like them (Maplin are just as guilty).

Before any of you leap to the defence of these money-grabbing bastards with claims of more costs than online businesses, don’t forget the inferior service places like this provide. People employed to give advice are thick as shit, because the clever ones will say “buy from online.” A related anecdote: I knew a person who was offered a job there after answering the following phone-interview question: “what brands do you know that PC World offer?” giving a list of brand names with “Dell” nestled discreetly in the middle. Just take any remotely technical query to some of their sales staff to see what I mean. An internet favourite is the classic “how much more does a hard drive weigh when it’s full compared to when it’s empty?” Not my idea but I don’t have an original source. Google it if you want. So yeah, even if PC world have higher operating costs, it’s not nearly worth it. You’re paying to propogate false knowledge and sustain idiocy in a field that’s understood badly enough as it is.

To round things off, if anyone knows a place that’s good for cheap LCD monitors, you’ve got to hook me up. I’m all for saving energy and that, but unless someone can get me a reasonable (as in, reasonably priced) replacement for my two 19″ (a bit vague there, they’re dual 1280×1024 resolution) CRTs (we’re talking in the mid 20s for size), I’m going to have to proceed with destroying the planet. Or steal some.

Interesting fact for the day: there are thirteen pairs of parantheses in this post (including this one).