On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:45:10 +0100 "Torben Stones" torben@stonesweb.org.uk allegedly wrote:
Well last week my hard disk gave up the ghost. This is the first disk I've had that has actually died, the other two just started to produce loads of bad sectors and the SMART monitor gave me warning. But there was nothing with this drive, lucky I just backup most of the important stuff.
Anyway enough of my rambling. I could just buy a new hard disk and get every thing up and running, but I just might use this as an excus to update my computer (It's 6-7 years old), and get something more up-to-date and hopefully more efficient.
Torb/All
Coincidentally I have just built myself a new rig because my older Dual core Pentium 4 box (whilst still very usable) was really struggling with the video transcoding I have been doing. So I decided to invest in a Core 2 Duo and chose the E6750 as the likeliest balance of price and power to give me a boost.
I have used 121Comouters in Diss many times so I went to them to see if they could do a reasonable deal on a processor. If so I was prepared to splash out on new motherboard, case, memory, disk and DVDRW (so I could keep the older rig largely intact). They were helpful as usual but as they didn't have a new 6750 in stock, they offered me one which had been istalled in a build for a customer who changed his mind. The price was good (under £100) so I ended up buying that, plus a Gigabyte board, 4Gig of Kingston RAM, a one terabyte (OK, 1000 Gigabytes...) disk, 20x DVDRW, case and PSU all for £368.
OK, you could probably save £30-40 on that if you went to ebuyer or somewhere similar - but here is the clincher in deciding to buy locally. The support and customer care.
When I got the shiny new machine built yesterday and fired it up for the first time, the POST reported that the processor was actually an E6550, not the E6750 I wanted. So I called 121. They apologised and immediately offered to refund me £20, or supply me with a an E8400 as a replacement at no charge. Now the E8400 is a pretty damned good processor so I decided to go with that offer. But I then had a hard time removing the E6550 because one of the cooler locating pins refused to release properly. I hate forcing anything on a motherboard for fear of damage so I put the whole PC in may car and trundled back to 121. Not only did they carefully remove the old processor, but they installed a new E8400 for me whilst I waited.
You don't get service like that from ebuyer. 121 are to be congratulated and I thoroughly recommend them.
And if you don't want to build your own machine, then they will build one for you to your spec.
Mick
(Oh, and of course, I have no relationship with 121 other than as a satisfied customer.)
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The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
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