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Click on the links below:
Buying in general
Widescreen Monitor
Buying Secondhand
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Buying in general
There are good and bad suppliers, hopefully I can steer you away from the bad and towards the good.
I have bought dozens of PCs on behalf of customers and can honestly say that I have never had a problem with Dell.
I always joke that by supplying a Dell I am doing myself out of work because I never hear from that customer again! That’s not quite true because sometimes I am called back to add software, give training or to supply another one for their spouse!
Remember that Dell don’t sell in shops, so cut out the middleman’s markup.
Which brings me to PC World. They always have special online offers which are cheaper than the instore price. But you can reserve those items online and then walk into your local store and collect them and pay for them instore at the online price. Check them out - I’ve got things cheaper that way than from my trade supplier.
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Widescreen Monitor
Do you fancy one of those nice widescreen TFT flat-panel monitors that are in the shops?
Don’t buy one until you have checked that your PC’s graphics card will support it.
First check the native resolution of the monitor that you are lusting after - it will usually be one of these:
Diag. Resolution
19” 1440 x 900
20” 1680 x 1050
24” 1920 x 1200
30” 2560 x 1600
Then go home and check if your PC will support it:
Right click on an empty part of the desktop
Left click Properties
Left click the Settings tab
Remember the current setting of the Screen resolution slider - just in case you change it by mistake
Move the Screen resolution slider from less to more and read the settings below it to see whether your PC will support the native resolution of your desired monitor.
If it cannot match it exactly, you will never get a perfect sharp undistorted picture - and that’s what you really want isn’t it? You will have to use a compromise setting on your new monitor and it will not look too good. Or buy a new graphics card!
Don’t forget to click Cancel on the Settings tab to stop any changes to your current display settings.
Why do all the widescreen PC monitors have a 16:10 aspect ratio when the standard for widescreen TV is 16:9? You would have thought that the designers would have settled on the same for both.
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Buying Secondhand
I have a neighbour who is over ninety, a widower and lives on his own.
Unlike so many of his age he still has all of his marbles but is sadly beginning to lose some of his physical abilities.
He had been using a very old desktop PC which was running Windows 98 (but he started computing with MSDos and still prefers it!).
He recently bought himself a secondhand laptop because “I’m going to have to go into a home soon, and I can take that with me”. Sad but true.
The laptop was a three or four year old Dell running Windows XP, but with no other programs installed.
He called me first to put an antivirus program (AVG) onto it. Very sensible.
He had been struggling with Wordpad and was annoyed that he couldn’t do double line spacing with it. So I took him a copy of Open Office and he was delighted.
But the next day he called me again to say that he had got a “funny occurrence”. This was no funny occurrence but Windows Genuine Advantage telling him that he had got a counterfeit copy of Windows XP.
Thanks Microsoft for worrying my old neighbour half to death. He had bought the laptop in good faith and had no way of telling if the OS was genuine - not that he even knew of the possibility that it might not be.
And thanks to the b*****d that sold him the laptop - couldn’t they find someone less vulnerable to rip-off?
You know what he said? If he couldn’t put up with the continuing warnings he would wipe the laptop and install his own old copy of Windows 98 on it! Good for him - I told him to go for it.
So if you are going to buy a secondhand PC, how can you tell if XP is genuine? There is one certain way that I know, and I strongly recommend it.
Check to see if Windows Defender is installed (Start, All Programs) and if so, open it to check that it isn’t just a false name leading to another program or nowhere. If Windows Defender is not installed, ask the vendor to download it from Microsoft and install it before you buy the PC.
Don’t buy a PC until you have seen Windows Defender running on it. It cannot be installed on a copy of Windows that Microsoft believes to be counterfeit.
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