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Arthur O'Hara advises on the best ways to make yourself a good choice. |
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Grab yourself a right PC bargain |
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There are two kinds of purchasers:
Before the massed PR battalions of the Retail empire call in their lawyers, let me make a logical assessment. If you need to touch and feel something before you buy it, and require the occasionally ill advised approval of a salesman too, then a computer store is the place to go. But, you will rarely find the best value or, without paying top dollar, an adequate computer system. This is why no PC veteran would dream of setting foot through a retailer's door except in dire circumstances. The cognoscenti have, in the past, tended to stick to direct-sales giants such as Dell, Dan, Panrix, Evesham, Carrera, Gateway, Tiny etc., who tailor keenly priced computer systems to order, letting you configure the specification (Spec) you fancy. This is still an excellent way of buying a PC, but the value part of the equation has now moved onto the net, where it is, naturally, in a state of some chaos. If you have the investigative skills of an MI6 operative, the patience of a priest, the determination of a big-game hunter and a knack for haggling, there is a scattering of extraordinary gems waiting to be bagged. You can also, if you are careless, end up with some colossal duds. It is, frankly, a jungle out there. You either eat or get eaten. So, here is what no computer-store salesman will ever offer you:
The first curiosity to understand is the nature of the insane beast known as the PC industry. Most consumer goods come to us in a familiar fashion, formed by the industrial revolution. They are launched at a price that will tempt customers through the door, then rise steadily in cost until that last-minute frenzy, usually a couple of years down the road, when they are sold off cheaply to make way for a replacement. PCs buck this trend in every respect. They are obsolete the moment they are made. They are launched at the highest price they will ever fetch, then steadily marked down until, less than a year after their appearance as the latest bright, shiny techno-toy, they fade into the twilight as castoffs in the bargain bin of a discounter's website. Most bizarrely of all, they are, perhaps in weeks, superseded by models that are more powerful and cost the same. That 650MHz premium model you picked up a month ago is now distinctly midrange, with a 700MHz or higher chip for the same price, and probably with a better monitor.
Do not begin to attempt to understand this conundrum. Just make it work to your advantage. PCs fit into three distinct families:
If it's the latter you fancy, then you will, without doubt, pay a premium. The one inflexible law of PC retailing stipulates that the latest, fastest, most hyped product fetches the highest price possible because that is what the geeks will pay. never mind that most of us have no need of a machine running at more than 500MHz (the computing speed of the computer's processing chip) (500MHz = half a gigahertz & = 500,000,000 instructions per second), half the speed of these silicon Schwarzeneggers. If this type of muscle is essential, then you must pay for it. The same goes for anyone chasing a Mac. The only people who make these are Apple, so your chance of a nice round of cut-throat competition between manufacturers is zero. In the happy middle ground beyond the gigahertz la-la land, there is, however, much to play for. Take those cheapies. The standard boxes frequently sport a hopeless 32Mb of Ram (the Random Access Memory hardware that stores information), monitors designed to make you squint and software designed in Albania. (Sorry Albania!). What you need is one of yesterday's star players, at the tail end of its glamour career but still with oodles of style and a touch of class. Greta Scacchi, say, rather than Gail Porter. The best deals come and go like digital mayflies as big companies liquidate excess stock or end-of-line items that are often perfectly good pieces of hardware. The secret lies in knowing where to look. Two sites are essential starting points: the clearance depots of Insight (www.insight.com) and MicroWarehouse (www.microwarehouse.com), both mail-order giants who now ship very busily on the web. Here you will find a fast-changing army of big-name machines falling out the door at prices that range from the acceptable to the ridiculous. Do not ignore Dixons (www.dixons.com) or its PC World subsidiary ( www.pcworld.com). You could see the all-in-one box, Advent e-Go, plummet in price soon in the Dixons empire, as it reaches the end of the line. Always buy your monitor separately; you will get more for your money. An extraordinary bargain - a lovely 15in Sony model with built-in speakers - recently went through the auction site QXL for £140. The seller was listed as Sony Centre, Kensington, who were telephoned and they agreed to take the opening price on QXL over the phone, saving both time and money.
Research is essential. Download the free search tool at Copernic, a Canadian technology company (www.copernic.com ), which scans hundreds of databases on the web. Even their top-of-the-range version is not too expensive. With that, it was possible to read UK and US reviews of Dixons's AST box and a glowing account of a future monitor in an Asian magazine. Decide on the specifications that suit your needs: the basics for a typical family who want net access without the expense of high speeds would be
Set the minimum specification you want and the price to pay, then wait for the market to come up with the goods. It will, and probably more quickly than you think. We are entering the happiest season for PC bargain-hunting. At the end of the summer, PC-makers rotate their lines to make way for Christmas stock. Over the next few months, virtually everything in their current inventory will have to make way for the models that are supposed to win our wallets come December. The hunting season is upon us and, as ever, it is the cunning who will walk away with the best prize.
All-rounder's star buy The biggest bargains are always at the bottom of the market, where stunning opportunities raise their heads from time to time - though it cannot be guaranteed that stocks remain of the price-savers uncovered here. This Century City PC was found on the Dixons website for £270 - it cost close to £1,000 with monitor when launched last year. The spec was excellent: a 500MHz Celeron chip with 64Mb of Ram, 8Gb hard drive, internal modem, mouse, keyboard and a decent selection of Microsoft applications. The hardware is housed in a compact, upright "closed" box only 13in high. All except the monitor plug into convenient USB ports that accept everything from a mouse to an external sound module or rewritable-CD drive. The monitor is an end-of-range upmarket Sony multimedia model with superb built-in speakers and subwoofer. It appeared on the QXL auction site for £140, half what it fetched a year ago. Including
delivery, the amount now spent was £428, so the marvellous little
Hauppauge WinTV unit (£80 from Jungle), which adds sophisticated TV
functions, FM radio and the ability to record video to disc, was added to
the bundle. Result: a powerful home PC with net facilities, hi-fi
audio and TV for little more than £500 (including Vat). In the
shops, the same chip and memory in a desktop system, with no TV and a
lesser monitor, costs £699 from Tiny. The best notebooks come from opposite ends of the spectrum - thin, light models that can be tucked into a briefcase, or big, beefy desktop replacements that mean you need no other PC. It was the latter that was wanted, and the perfect machine was an end-of-line Hewlett-Packard Xe, on offer for £1,600 at Insight with the mandatory 64Mb of Ram, a very acceptable Pentium II 400MHz processor plus a whopping 14.1in TFT screen. What
clinched the deal was a built-in DVD drive that meant movies could be
watched in-flight instead of playing solitaire. The closest
equivalent on HP's own site had a 500MHz chip and bigger hard drive for
£2,069. But the screen was only 13.1in and the CD drive was extra. Any PC costing more than £1,000 should deliver on many fronts, and Carrera's Octan i650S web special, pictured, won the day with an Athlon 650MHz processor, 128Mb of Ram, DVD and CD-rewritable drives, excellent sound, a tasty 17in monitor, two years' on-site warranty and even five free DVD rentals. This
machine will scream at games, copy CDs and play back DVD movies. It cost
£1,173 online at www.carrera.com
which described in detail a wealth of quality components from well-known
manufacturers as opposed to obscure suppliers used in deals elsewhere. You
could pay more than £100 extra for this self-same box through one of
Carrera's retail outlets. At the Dixons site, the similar Packard Bell
Pulsar 6001 will set you back £1,399 - though it does have a bigger hard
drive.
Cheap does not necessarily mean nasty, but there are plenty of grim deals out there. Here are a few common tricks the computer trade will use to separate you from your money: -
1
The bundle, aka 'never mind the quality, count the boxes'
2
Inadequate memory
3
Flaky monitors
4
The negative bundle
5
'Refurbished' stock
www.aria.co.uk www.carrera.co.uk www.dixons.co.uk www.insight.co.uk www.microwarehouse.com www.morgancomputers.co.uk www.qxl.co.uk www.simply.co.uk www.todayonly.co.uk www.ebookers.com
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| What is the best image format to
use to create web-friendly graphics that are not as large or clumsy as BMP
or Tiff files?
There are a number of choices available to the budding web designer. The most popular graphic format for smaller images is Gif, which offers an impressively compressed size even when used for animated graphics. Be aware, though, that because of a continuing patent and licensing storm surrounding the American computer giant Unisys and the Gif format, many website owners are now moving over to PNG (or Portable Network Graphics). For more information see burnallgifs.org. The de facto standard for online photographs is Jpeg, which provides excellent and scaleable compression with a minimum degradation of quality. Most high-quality graphics packages, such as Photoshop from www.adobe.com and Paint Shop Pro (www.jasc.com), will handle Jpeg files with ease.
The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and Pop3 (Post Office Protocol) servers are the computers that control and transmit e-mail over the internet, from PC to PC and country to country. SMTP handles outgoing mail and Pop3 acts as the incoming- message Post Office box. The conventional identifier is based on the name of your Internet Service Provider (ISP). If your ISP's address is www.isp . com, it is likely that the SMTP address will be something like smtp.isp . com (or, more commonly, mail.isp . com) and the Pop3 server address will be pop3.isp . com However, these rules are not sacrosanct and it pays to check and seek specific details from your ISP directly.
It is obvious that there are those amongst us who resent the surreptitious way that certain advertising-supported software organisations associated with software application downloads tracks our browsing habits without our knowledge or explicit consent. The genre has attracted the name spyware, and is currently considered by many to be an abuse of online privacy. My view is that while the decision to implement such tracking systems without disclosure is definitely a bad marketing decision, it is very sinister. I remain willing to reveal details of some of my habits in exchange for better-targeted advertising and free software that I find really useful, such as Copernic, SurfSaver and NetSonic. For an emotive look at the online spyware issue, check out Steve Gibson's excellent site at grc.com/optout.htm. Steve's software is lovingly hand crafted in pure code, it takes up very little space on your computer and is something you should seriously think of having behind you while you make good and safe use of your computer on the www.
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