The "I bought a computer from PC World, Currys or Dixons" Thread

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by VSPNET

I bought a motherboard form PC world 2 years ago like a muppet. It broke in 3 months and i had to go back and get a refund but they couldnt find my details on there system :S even though i have used my debit card.

Advice for anyone wanting to buy a computer:


-Buy a book on building computers for dummies,
-Buy ALL your components from the internet, Somewhere like
> Ebuyer.com, CPUCity.com, Aria.co.uk
-Build it your self!

NOTE: There is warranty on parts you buy no need to pay extra.

Although I buy from the Internet regularly, I have had problems in the past with after sales service. When I first got an athlon, I bought the CPU from Dabs and the motherboard from Simply. The motherboard blew, and took the CPU with it. Both companies claimed it was the fault of the other, and it took a long time to get replacements.

I am not really advising people not to buy from the Internet, I could just have easily had the same problem if I had bought from two shops.

[Paul K]

Oh well....
*Stands up*
I too bought a PC from PC World.....once Packard Bell circa 1995. P75 CPU and 16Mb of Ram. It lasted less than a week before the combined SoundCard/ Modem threw its first hissy fit...... within a month it was back in PC World Tech Support and over the next 3 months they had more time with it than I did.
6 months after purchase the majority of the PC was ripped out and binned and I was building my first PC with only the instructions that came with the parts to help. Not suprisingly it ran better and was more stable than the PB

[Taf]

I bought a PC from PCWorld... Packard Bell DX100/ 250Mb HD/4Mb RAM/1Mb Video. What clinched the deal was a freefone support number direct to Packard Bell for 3 years!

I upgraded the RAM to 16Mb for about £150, but it was soon blindingly obvious that PCs were moving ahead so fast that my new acquisition would be useless in the near future. After only a few months Packard Bell dropped the freefone support number and PCWorld did not want to know, Windows 95 arrived and my machine was effectively dead in the water.

By that time PCWorld was full of old, overpriced kit so my next PC came from mail order... and lasted me 6 years until it was itself overtaken by technology.

PCWorld has had its day as far as I'm concerned... I'm not even drawn to stroll around their local store whilst I wait for my car to be serviced a few yards away.

[dragon]

the biggest joke about PC world is their instore prices, espcially when they themselives will beat their own prices via their website.

Case in point

netgear wt511-t Pc world store price £60
Aria/dabs/ebuyer £27
pc world site £23

The really stupid thing is that by reserving it online i popped into the store and got it for £23, don't get me wrong its great to get it cheaper but its kinda strange that they beat their own prices, not just by a little but sometimes by lot

[Vlad_Dracul]

Well first things first,packard Bell are junk. PC world is just a high street store that sells computers to the masses. The average member of the public knows very little about PC's. They want an off the shelf solution with the promise of some backup and DRG/PC World provides it. Joe public thinks a pc is just like any consumer electrical item, i.e you plug it in,switch on and it works for ever more. Oh no,not so simple. Whilst i maintain that PB's are junk,I will also agree that most computer "faults" are generated by the user and not the hardware. I have always built my own pc's from scratch. The one Im on now was self build a few years back .Its a pentium 3 500mhz with half a gig of ram a Radeon 7000 agp graphics card,a 60gig drive,a DVD RW and a CDRW plus other bits. Its still way powerfull enough for all my tasks and i dont need to upgrade. My bro bought his first family pc years back from PCW. It cost a fortune and was poor VFM. It was a PB. True it soldiered on for years til it died and then he went shopping for another one. When i ventured that he should buy a built up clone he said " I'm not having any old crap",get the mind set and lack of understanding?. The other thing about my local PCW (Stockport) is that the staff seem unable to take money off people. I go in there for the odd part cos its convenient and all i see is two legged gold everywhere,punters looking to buy,to spend cash but can they do it? no,theres hardly an assistant about and usually only one person on the tills at the front.

My sister has just bought a new pc & has left her old one with me to see if it's worth upgrading. Trouble is, according to the WWW it doesn't exist!

It's an eMachines eTower 310, bought from PC World. It has a Trigem Cognac Rev. G mobo. According to the chipset specs. (Intel FW82801AA), it should support ATA/66 transfer rates (equivalent to udma4 I believe) & the Seagate HD specs. say it is capable of udma5.

When I run Sisoft Sandra, however, it tells me that it is only transfering at udma2. I have replaced the original (40 way) IDE cable with an 80 way cable & checked the bios, which is set to udma4.

Any ideas as to how to get the max transfer rate?

[handyman]

Originally Posted by dooper786

Whilst i maintain that PB's are junk

I do agree that they are not 1st class computers but when I needed a new computer and did not have the cash to buy one I resorted to buying a PB. Still 2 years later with a few additions its fighting fit, as is the PB 12" laptop which is just over a year old.

I will build my next PC but it will have to use doner parts from the main system til i can replace them.. Fancy another AMD.

[basa]

I bought my first PC from PC World about 6-7 years ago.

Being permanently pennyless I soon learned to delve inside it and fix things as required (with a few minor disasters I have to say). That was in the days of Cable & Wireless dial up !!

Soon I was into upgrading and then building my own (I've built 4 moderate spec PC's now). One day I'll convert to XP !!! (when Vista is released and the price of XP drops)

Now I would NEVER buy bits, let alone a PC from PC World and would never buy a ready assembled PC from say Dell, Packard Bell or god forbid those 'emachines' things (are they still going ??).

I like to know what is in my PC, where it goes and what it's for !!

I'm also now generating a very small income repairing other peoples PCs .. malware etc. Although the last repair was over the phone when a young lady wanted to know how to increase the brightness of her Siemens lappie display (Fn + -->)

[Stuart]

My one and only experience of eMachines was when a friend bought one abroad, didn't realise it had a 110V power supply, didn't tell me where she got it from, borrowed a kettle lead type power lead from me and plugged it in.

Luckily the internal fuse went before it caught fire.

[nffc]

Originally Posted by XFS03

My sister has just bought a new pc & has left her old one with me to see if it's worth upgrading. Trouble is, according to the WWW it doesn't exist!

It's an eMachines eTower 310, bought from PC World. It has a Trigem Cognac Rev. G mobo. According to the chipset specs. (Intel FW82801AA), it should support ATA/66 transfer rates (equivalent to udma4 I believe) & the Seagate HD specs. say it is capable of udma5.

When I run Sisoft Sandra, however, it tells me that it is only transfering at udma2. I have replaced the original (40 way) IDE cable with an 80 way cable & checked the bios, which is set to udma4.

Any ideas as to how to get the max transfer rate?

Emachines 310

Checked the controllers in Device Manager? Tried to recover the PC?

---------- Post added at 17:35 ---------- Previous post was at 17:33 ----------

Originally Posted by basa

Now I would NEVER buy bits, let alone a PC from PC World and would never buy a ready assembled PC from say Dell, Packard Bell or god forbid those 'emachines' things (are they still going ??).

Very much so, they have been bought by Gateway after Trigem's demise, and are being sold in Staples / Comet as well as sometimes in DSG stores - that said, DSG seem to be concentrating more on own brand (Advent/Patriot/EiSystems) and external exclusives (Compaq/PB) than piles of junk like eMachines with time-bomb PSUs!

---------- Post added at 17:36 ---------- Previous post was at 17:35 ----------

Originally Posted by Stuart C

My one and only experience of eMachines was when a friend bought one abroad, didn't realise it had a 110V power supply, didn't tell me where she got it from, borrowed a kettle lead type power lead from me and plugged it in.

Luckily the internal fuse went before it caught fire.

You were lucky the PSU didn't blow, they do that for no reason so doubling the voltage should have fried teh whole PC

Originally Posted by nffc

Emachines 310

Checked the controllers in Device Manager? Tried to recover the PC?...

I did see that model listed, but the model in front of me is an eTower 310, which, strangely, isn't listed under the eTower range on any websites.

It does look like the one you quoted is the one I have though (the only difference being the model of hard drive).

The drivers for the IDE controllers in device manager are working corectly. They are the ones installed by Win XP during installation. Under advanced settings, the current transfer mode is shown as "Ultra DMA Mode 2".

I'm not sure what you mean by "recover the PC". When I got the machine, I formatted the hard drive, & did a clean install of WinXP.

I am wondering whether to flash the bios with the HP 307 bios, which I think gives more options to play with. It also allows you to turn off the splash screen at start up.

[nffc]

That is the right model. Any differences internally would have been production-line / BoM differences but the spec should be equivalent.

UDMA mode 2 is evidently the maximum that combination, in that state, can support. AFAIK, there's no way of changing it in XP.

Recover the PC - yeah... using the disks supplied (with a Ghost image) not an XP disk. With an emachines it probably won't make much difference.

Originally Posted by nffc

That is the right model. Any differences internally would have been production-line / BoM differences but the spec should be equivalent.

UDMA mode 2 is evidently the maximum that combination, in that state, can support. AFAIK, there's no way of changing it in XP.

Recover the PC - yeah... using the disks supplied (with a Ghost image) not an XP disk. With an emachines it probably won't make much difference.

I still find it strange that it is not listed under the eTower range, as it is clearly labelled (once on the front & twice on the back) as an eTower 310. Naturally, when I wanted to find out more about it on the internet, this is what I searched for, & when it came up with no hits, I was a bit suprised!

Perhaps I have a unique machine sitting in front of me. Perhaps it's a "one-off" . Having said that, my sister did tell me that it was a display model they bought, as they didn't have any others in stock.

It also seems strange to use a chipset with UDMA4 capabilities, but limit it to UDMA2. Having said that, I wonder how much difference in transfer speed this will actually make in practice. I just wanted to get the most out of it before she passes it on. I have doubled the memory from 128M to 256M & it's amazing how much difference that has made.

I should have realised what you meant by "recover", as I have got the recovery disc here, but it is Windows ME based, so I won't be using it.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by nffc

You were lucky the PSU didn't blow, they do that for no reason so doubling the voltage should have fried teh whole PC

Well, it did blow both the PSU's internal fuse and the one in the lead. I was in work at the time. I am lucky it didn't trip the RCD protecting the mains sockets. I would have lost a lot of work that I hadn't got around to saving on my own PC.

[nffc]

Originally Posted by XFS03

I still find it strange that it is not listed under the eTower range, as it is clearly labelled (once on the front & twice on the back) as an eTower 310. Naturally, when I wanted to find out more about it on the internet, this is what I searched for, & when it came up with no hits, I was a bit suprised!

Perhaps I have a unique machine sitting in front of me. Perhaps it's a "one-off" . Having said that, my sister did tell me that it was a display model they bought, as they didn't have any others in stock.

It also seems strange to use a chipset with UDMA4 capabilities, but limit it to UDMA2. Having said that, I wonder how much difference in transfer speed this will actually make in practice. I just wanted to get the most out of it before she passes it on. I have doubled the memory from 128M to 256M & it's amazing how much difference that has made.

I should have realised what you meant by "recover", as I have got the recovery disc here, but it is Windows ME based, so I won't be using it.

Fair point - but if you restore with the ME / Ghost image, and it's working in UDMA4, you know it's driver-related - which is tbh my main suspicion.

It is pretty much nailed the 310 - I have no tools to check the s/n on an Emachines but there is no difference between an "etower 310" and a 310 - they're labelled differently in US/UK anyway so it will be DSG labelling not the emachines.

As far as the info on the PCSC site states (which is the same as we get!) it's an Intel 810 chipset for which drivers can be found here - unfortunately, there is no information on what behaviour the specific HW combination exhibits in XP, as it's a bundled ME machine. The chipset driver is a generic driver for all OS and for all MBs on that set, so it should work.

You could re-set the Bios defaults but I don't think it's Bios-level or hardware related.

Alternatively strip the three IDE controllers as well as the HD's drivers and optical drive in Device Manager, reboot and let it re-detect, see what that does?