Supermarket Computers

[chef7514]

The new computers safeway are selling which includes keyboard, monitor, 40gb, 256ram plus at £399 makes some of the prices now being charged just for a basic tower on this site a joke

[thorpepie]

The basic towers safeway are selling are a joke .. wish i could make thta ammount on every computer!!!

[low_art]

I'm all for supermarkets driving down the price of PC's. Not the best outlet if you are looking for after sales support but then many large well known PC specialising outlets may not be either. I remember a period when Tesco were selling iMacs which Apple were not happy about (Apple are notorious for wanting to approve who sells their compies). I also remember a few years ago seeing a Fujitsu computer laid out amongst a fruit & veg display (honestly)-seemed surreal at the time- now you see TV's, DVD's , Mobile phones a few isles down from toilet rolls.
In theory economies of scale should be able to give us the £199 computer (with monitor).In the US Walmart is doing well with it's $199 (that's DOLLAR) PC (without Windows and monitor) but it's mail order only.
Having said that only Apple & Dell are still making healthy(ish) profits out of selling computers (neither use supermarkets to sell their wares and they have few retail outlets themselves- both are largely mail order driven).

http://boxer.ebid.co.uk/perl/objects...5-0&mo=auction

[bigusdave]

As another poor mug who has spent half his adult life as an IT professional, I always try to remember the old adage that if it looks to good to be true it probably is.

sure you see computers at tesco et al for what looks to be knock down prices, the problem is that they are very low quality machines and you get **** support

the odd exception being apple imacs and the very ocasional out of date machine from a major brand that finds its way into that chanel

margins on pc's are almost negative now days hence the takeover of the market by the likes of dell who lets face it sell fairly good kit for silly money especially at the bottom end of the market

I own a computer company and I used to ship 1000+ machines a month which we built in house, I stopped building machines apart for my own use and customers with specific requirements like servers or high end gaming or graphics workstations in 1999 as it simply wasnt worth the hassle

I now let customers buy dell out of preference as they usualy work fine and the custome rgets a fair deal, lets face it a basic entry level celeron workstation with 15" flat panel for about £350 with a 1 year RTB warranty isnt exactly a rip off

[custombuiltcomputers]

The new computers safeway are selling which includes keyboard, monitor, 40gb, 256ram plus at £399 makes some of the prices now being charged just for a basic tower on this site a joke

they prob come with "shared video ram" this means the video memory is extracted from the main ram, so the 256mb ram would really be 128mb when you take out the graphics ram, windows xp needs 128mb ram to run, so this leaves bugger all to run anything else, therefore the computer will crash all time. 40gb hard discs are small for todays standards. plus companys that mass prroduce computers install windows to the computer from a multi license disc, meaning you do not get a backup disc, with small system buildiners you pay £64 per copy of xp which comes with a OEM disc.

i could build you a pc for that, or any spec computer you need, just contact me for a quote, details in ebid store

case £25
motherboard with shared vid £39
celeron 325 2.53ghz 533fsb £52
256mb 400mhz ddr £25
40gb hd £32
dvd rw/cdr £27 (no copying software)
budget keyboard/mouse/speakers £7
17 inch crt £60
xp home £64

£331 + £15 delivery parts + £40 to build = £386 (payed with cheque) or + 3.9% i would need to pay pppay = £399

[PDCSolutions]

I would not disagree with them, they are ok for a limited home user use, internet and homework, their have many problems, shared memory being one, where the RAM is handed over th the graphics card, so your 256mb is less 64MB to the graphics(if that is what you can call it), also it seems they use slow motherboards with slow front side buses, the AMD motherboards work at a nice 1000mhz FSB and over, alot of the systems out have a FSB of around half, their is no point in having a super fast CPU, Ram and all when your motherboard is slow, again the problem is also too fast a motherboard and too slow CPU or RAM,

Due to their "bulk" buying power, they can sell sysems very cheep, and i guess don't make too much money per sale, but times it by 1000s if not, 100,000s of systems, it adds up, and coming upto xmas, and the world being so full of I.T, i can see why people pick up the "cheep" systems from supermartkets, only to have them crash about a few months down the line( i would think..lol )

Paul
PDC Solutions