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How to buy a new PC at Cheap PCs UK
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Choosing a new PC can be a bewildering experience. A flick through the pages of the many PC computing magazines now on sale, can leave you easily more confused than when you started out. And finding the cheapest PCs in UK is even more difficult! However with some basic preparation and planning, you can quickly narrow down your search criteria and make the process easier, if still not exactly pleasurable.
Pricing a new PC
First thing to consider is price. With new PCs available from £300 or so, you need to give some thought as to what you can really afford. If your use is occasional or infrequent, do you really need to be investing in a £2k PC? And don't go thinking that spending just a few hundred pounds on a PC necessarily means you will be compromising on quality either. Dell, for example, are well known for producing quality PC systems, and, with prices in the mid hundreds, means that quality need not be the sole preserve of the deep pocketed.
Picking a PC specification
Once you have decided on a budget for a new PC, the next question you could ask yourself is 'what specification of PC do I need?'. The adverts are groaning under the weight of PC specifications, listing Athlon this, Pentium that, SIMMs, DIMMS, CD-RW and CD-R, CRTs, VDUs, optical mice and USB 2. For general use, the choice of processor is not too much of a concern, only real power or games users will notice the real-life differences in processor type, although to avoid instant obsolescence, it doesn't harm to buy the quickest processor you can within reason. Graphics cards can be a headache too; unless your a big PC games fan, where on-board RAM on the graphics card is very important in running games well, a middle of the road 3D card will be enough
for most people.
How do I choose a PC Supplier?
Probably the single most critical decision to make is regarding the choice of supplier for your new PC. Many many small businesses have sprung up offering to build you a cheap PC for £2-300, and these can make for a sound buy. I'd recommend you seek out feedback from existing customers before laying out you own cash however - whereas there are many reputable PC builders around offering a great price, there are many rogues that won't think twice about bolting a PC together using outmoded or even secondhand components, and offer the most basic of warranties. As with buying a secondhand car, try to choose a supplier
that looks like it'll still be around in 6 months time, in case something breaks and you want to make a warranty claim. It's for this reason that unless the supplier is a household name, I'd avoid buying any PC over the phone, especially where the companies offices are unknown. You can get some peace of mind knowing that if there is a problem, you can physically take the PC to the supplying company, and speak to them face to face. Therefore if buying by telephone, or over the internet, I'd recommend only going for a well known PC supplier, such as Dell, PC World or Dixons for instance, that can easily be contacted, and are by no means fly-by-night. A quick read of the warranty and support offered by the leading brands listed here, should also offer more peace of mind to reassure you, details of which will be on that company's own website.
What are you going to need?
You can save a great deal of money if you are realistic about what you want your PC to do. You probably wouldn't buy a top of the line microwave if, for example, all you ever use one for is defrosting a loaf of bread. Same goes for PCs. If you write books or technical journals for instance, your priorities could be a decent amount of hard disk storage space, and a quality laser printer. A graphic designer on the other hand will put great weight on processor power, and the level of memory built into the spec of the PCs motherboard and graphics card. An online gaming fanatic will also have great use for top-end graphics, screen and processor power, with games being amongst the most resource-hungry software that you can hope to find. At the other end of the scale, if the PC is for a school child or student to prepare coursework or homework on, with occasional visits to the internet to source information, a basic PC for a few hundred pounds will more than suffice.
Building a new PC
One option best left to techies is that of building a PC yourself. Savings can be made, although in reality this option is best left to the computing hobbyist who revels in stripping their PC down every other weekend to further tune and tweak their systems performance.
Next steps
My advice would be to consider the subjects I've touched on above, then have a leisurely look around the PC suppliers I have handpicked on the left hand side of this page, to get a feel for the PCs that are on offer today.
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