Ludicrous rip-offs

Angilion

Angilion

Angilion

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A coworker wants me to sort them out with a cheap PC. All they do on it is web, email and some word processing, so a bottom-end budget PC would be fine. I'm not going to bother with the usual building and installation for it - I'm just going to get a pre-built system with everything pre-installed, so all I have to do is uninstall the completely useless rubbish such PCs always have pre-installed.

OcUK isn't the right place for that, so I went looking at the website for a company well known for selling cheap (and not at all good) PCs.

Full system for something like £250, with Vista and a monitor...that would do. A64 X2 4200 is far more than enough for them...but only 1GB of memory. With Vista and onboard graphics, that might be a bit on the low side. DDR2 is extremely cheap at the moment, so I decided I may as well spec it with 2GB instead. The difference in price is less than £15, right? The site has drop-down menus for making changes to the basic specs.

Having the machine fitted with 2x1GB of DDR2 instead of 2x512MB of DDR2 costs an extra £60!

So I looked around a bit more...

The basic spec has a DVD drive, described as "16x DVD +/- RW Drive"

For an extra £10, you can have a DVDROM drive fitted as well. It's a recommended upgrade. The blurb states "Upgrade to this drive to watch and burn DVDs on your PC".

Because, of course, a DVD writer can't read DVDs. You need a DVDROM drive for that. Obviously.

EDIT: Oh, and it has a 250W PSU, for who knows what reason.
 
Yes they charge loads for some upgrades, which is why you don't buy them ;)

Get it with the smallest amount of RAM possible and put some in yourself, it's a 30 second job. As for the DVD drive it's probably just a standard layout used for all their budget systems, some of which may only have a CD RW.

I don't see a problem with it having a 250w PSU either, it's more than adequate, I doubt it would use more than 130w under load.
 
I'd recommend that famous yellow place that do their (print) ads in black & white :D They have big name/brand refurbished PCs & laptops. Guaranteed to get a good deal & something reputable ;)
 
I'm intending to ask if they'll ship it without RAM and knock at least £40 off the price on the basis that if going from 1GB to 2GB costs £60, the first GB probably costs at least £40 :)

I'm sure the PSU could handle the hardware, but it goes against the grain to have the minimum and no scope for upgrades. It isn't just the total output, it's how much at each voltage. I'm almost sure that it will be impossible to run a decent graphics card without replacing the PSU...but why am I bothered? They explicitly asked me to spec a machine that was not going to be used to play any games other than web games and Solitaire, with the whole point being low cost.

I'd rather not have bothered. They won't even have it delivered to their house, because they'd have to make arrangements for someone to be there.
 
hp7909 said:
I'd recommend that famous yellow place that do their (print) ads in black & white :D They have big name/brand refurbished PCs & laptops. Guaranteed to get a good deal & something reputable ;)
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They're a competitor - Zefan.

The person I'm buying for would probably not want a refurbished PC, because they'd see that as tacky and worn or something...and why pay £300 for a second-hand PC when you can get a new one for £300? Like most people, they neither know nor care what components are in their PC.
 
TBH i would build him one yourself. By the time you add more ram and faff about removing bloatware that does'nt want to be removed it would be far easier to build one. You can put together a rig complete with OS (Vista 64 or XP) for under £300 even from here. I built myself a pc that does what he wants and also plays some games, last year for under £250. Nice little rig too. E4300, 2GB Corsair XMS2 5400C4, Foxconn M-atx mobo, ATI X1600XT pci-e, 250GB Samsung Spinpoint Sata2 hdd, Samsung Writemaster 18x DVDRW, Icute cube case with 450w psu and XP Pro. Got some bits brand new off the bay and the others from shopping around. Did the same for my partners sister too but that was based around an AMD AM2 rig.
 
Yeh people think they can charge such high amounts. PC world acctually charge £90 for fitting a wireless network. I mean they probably not even professionals and they get away with it because the general public aint got a clue.

I have to agree with pastymuncher. Build your own or get somebody you trust to build it.
 
pastymuncher said:
TBH i would build him one yourself. By the time you add more ram and faff about removing bloatware that does'nt want to be removed it would be far easier to build one. You can put together a rig complete with OS (Vista 64 or XP) for under £300 even from here. I built myself a pc that does what he wants and also plays some games, last year for under £250. Nice little rig too. E4300, 2GB Corsair XMS2 5400C4, Foxconn M-atx mobo, ATI X1600XT pci-e, 250GB Samsung Spinpoint Sata2 hdd, Samsung Writemaster 18x DVDRW, Icute cube case with 450w psu and XP Pro. Got some bits brand new off the bay and the others from shopping around. Did the same for my partners sister too but that was based around an AMD AM2 rig.
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All well and good but I can see why the OP is thinking of going the pre-built route, the small fact of a monitor INCLUDED. Add a monitor on top of what you spec and you're pushing £400.

Sean :)
 
Angilion said:
The person I'm buying for would probably not want a refurbished PC, because they'd see that as tacky and worn or something
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Not refurbished in that sense. Most of their stock is surplus from large orders made by big corporate companies ;)

Also they get this stock direct from the manufactures such as Toshiba who will have taken the liberty of replacing missing packaging/manuals/etc :)

A mate had similar doubts but he decided to drop into one of their stores & sow for himself.
 
You know, what you call ‘rip-off’ is probably just a clever pricing model.

You under-cut your completion in the budget market by advertising PCs at very low mark-ups (or no mark-up at all). You then place a higher mark-up on upgrades to make your money back.

Its really just about getting hold of the customer. Once you’ve done that you can flog him the upgrades and recover costs, but at the end of the day the amount he pays probably won’t be much different then what he would have done anyway.

Is that a rip-off? Console manufacturers sell their machines below cost, and then make it back by charging big royalties on the games. Are console games a rip-off for being so expensive? (Edit: On second though, don't answer that. :P)
 
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Angilion said:
Full system for something like £250, with Vista and a monitor...that would do. A64 X2 4200 is far more than enough for them...but only 1GB of memory. With Vista and onboard graphics, that might be a bit on the low side.
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For word processing and web browsing? You must be joking.
 
Energize said:
For word processing and web browsing? You must be joking.
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When they have a dozen windows open and eleventy-six things running in the background because they installed them without knowing they were doing so, perhaps. They'll still be using this PC in several year's time. For an extra £15, I think it's worth having 2GB instead of 1GB.
 
DJsean said:
All well and good but I can see why the OP is thinking of going the pre-built route, the small fact of a monitor INCLUDED. Add a monitor on top of what you spec and you're pushing £400.

Sean :)
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Exactly. It's also increasing irritation - I have to arrange delivery (or collect it myself), etc, etc. An hour or two on top to build it and install everything moves into "Can't be arsed" territory.

The aforementioned seller of bottom of the barrel budget systems was including a 19 inch widescreen LCD. Sure, it will be rubbish, but it will impress the hell out of them compared with the 15 inch CRT they're using now (which was rubbish many years ago).

If I want to buy good kit and choose my own combination of components (which is part of the fun), I'll shop here. If I want to buy any old rubbish that works on a shoestring budget for people who wouldn't know one component from another, don't want to know and only want a PC that allows them to play simple Flash games online, I'll buy prebuilt. I'd buy that from here too, but OcUK just don't go far enough down the market and they don't sell PCs with a few quid profit while pushing over-priced extended warranties for the real profit.
 
Angilion said:
When they have a dozen windows open and eleventy-six things running in the background because they installed them without knowing they were doing so, perhaps. They'll still be using this PC in several year's time. For an extra £15, I think it's worth having 2GB instead of 1GB.
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I still think your overestimating the requirements, I had multiple windows open on even 32MB machines with no problems. And background processes don't really use much memory either.
 
Angilion said:
Exactly. It's also increasing irritation - I have to arrange delivery (or collect it myself), etc, etc. An hour or two on top to build it and install everything moves into "Can't be arsed" territory.

The aforementioned seller of bottom of the barrel budget systems was including a 19 inch widescreen LCD. Sure, it will be rubbish, but it will impress the hell out of them compared with the 15 inch CRT they're using now (which was rubbish many years ago).

If I want to buy good kit and choose my own combination of components (which is part of the fun), I'll shop here. If I want to buy any old rubbish that works on a shoestring budget for people who wouldn't know one component from another, don't want to know and only want a PC that allows them to play simple Flash games online, I'll buy prebuilt. I'd buy that from here too, but OcUK just don't go far enough down the market and they don't sell PCs with a few quid profit while pushing over-priced extended warranties for the real profit.
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Fine, it was just a suggestion. No need to get upset about it. Best thing you can do is try using an internet search then as you can't ask for places that sell pre-builts on here. If you don't want peoples opinions then i don't know why you posted in the first place.
 
pastymuncher said:
Fine, it was just a suggestion. No need to get upset about it. Best thing you can do is try using an internet search then as you can't ask for places that sell pre-builts on here. If you don't want peoples opinions then i don't know why you posted in the first place.
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I'm not upset about your suggestion. The irritation I referred to is with the person I'm doing this for as a favour, not with you.

I posted because I found the upgrade charges ludicrous enough to be worthy of comment. Partly humour, because people here know what the cost should be, and partly annoyance, because it's trading on the ignorance of people who don't.
 
get the pre-built and get the upgrades via a different website (OCUK), building a rig is not worth the hassle as you will hae to cover the warranty, let Dell boy do that...
 
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