No home should be without one!

[Yorkie]

How times change!

Remember when...?

Reminds me of when - back in 1985 - I paid £175 for a 16K Sinclair Spectrum, then upgrared it to the ulitmate - 48k, for an extra £48!

[Retired]

Hi,

Thanks for the nostalgia David and how things have changed.

Around 1998 I visited PC world as a total novice and bought my first PC. It was a Compaq with something like a 6gig hard drive which at that time was enormous. I detest insurance companies with a passion and the sales assistant kept banging on about insurance cover for four years and this was quoted at £240. The PC package was £1,000 but came with a discount of £100. The assistant wouldn't let it be regarding insurance and I was starting to become rather annoyed by his persistence; it finally ended when he brought the branch manager to explain the error of my ways in not accepting the insurance. I said enough of this; either accept my £900 cash or I'm going elsewhere. I did ask if the insurance actually covered five years to which I was informed no; it is for four years and I then pointed out that it was in fact for three years because the new computer came with a manufacturers one year guarantee. Not a good start to computing but I came away with the package and to this day still retain the old VDU although I upgraded a few years ago with the computer.

I recently bought a 1TB external hard drive for use in backing up and this was very cheap through eBay.

I wish printers had progressed as much. Printers are very cheap but then this is compensated for by the rip off price of inks; it hardly helps the planet by supplying ink cartridges containing about the same amount of ink as a decent pen. I no longer use the printing function on my Epsom Stylus DX 8400. Every time I install a new expensive cartridge and print a test page the cartridge then reads just over half full. In frustration I checked reviews of this printer on the web to find other owners have the same problem whether using OEM ink cartridge or compatibles. I've since bought an HP Laserjet mono P1102W printer which gets little use.

I have also owned a Samsung Mono laser printer but when I needed the toner cartridge the cartridge at £79.95 was 5p cheaper than buying the entire printer. I know the printer companies have to make profit to remain in business but this sort of thing is just ridiculous.

I hope your thread receives many replies David as it opens up a vast subject.

Kind regards, Col.

[Andy M0FYA]

Insurance on a computer reminds me of when I bought my first one, also in the late 90s, from Time Computers, now no longer in business.
I sat down with the sales assistant and we put together the spec for what I needed and I agreed the price. He then launched into the hard-sell of the insurance, to which I replied that each major component of the computer, motherboard, hard-drive etc would cost less than the insurance cost to replace, I didn't believe I would be unlucky enough for more than one to fail, so thanks but no thanks.
He then continued the tirade about how valuable and essential the extra insurance was.
At this point I asked "Do you get paid commission on the sale of a computer?"
"No" he replied.
"Do you get paid commission on the sale of extra insurance?"
At this point he blushed bright red and very hesitantly admitted that he did!

It actually was a very good computer, and I didn't retire it until I was hitting problems with compatibility of software applications with Windows 98 and I decided I needed a general upgrade so bought an HP computer.

Andy

[Tedzed1]

Crikey, 16k divided by £175 equates to just over ninty three and a half pence per byte, Imagine what a modern computer would
cost today at a similar price per byte

[Joe]

I'm lucky with printers as cartridges for my old Epsom one are only fifty bob from Choice Stationary and can be refilled, though a local company quoted my four-teen quid to do this!

The cartridges for my laser are around the fifty pound mark but do seem to have dropped a bit since I got it. It's been showing a level of 0% for months and when it does finally give out I've already got a refill kit at the ready for which I paid ten quid.

Both these printers, as with all my computer equipment, are land-fill dodgers.

- Joe

[Steve_P]

Andy - So you're the one who actually got a PC that worked from Time are you?

Cheers,

Steve P.

[Andy M0FYA]

Steve, I've heard various people say bad things about their Time computer, but I can honestly say it served me well until overtaken by err...........time!

The only issue I ever had with it was software decoding of films on DVD. It had a 900MHz processor (1GHz had just come out, and were a lot more expensive), and all the advice was that 800MHz and above would be OK, but I never got it to work properly. In the end I gave up and side-stepped the problem by installing a hardware DVD decoding card.

I have remained with Supanet as my ISP since then. Supanet was part of Time, but it was hived off before the computer building part went belly-up. Not the cheapest of ISPs, but they have been very reliable as far as I am concerned (rapidly looking for a piece of wood to touch!). And their call-centre is still in Burnley, not Bangalore! (Although their registered office is in Cyprus).
And the thought of having to change my email address fills me with dread!

Andy

[pwdrive]

We used to sell the Dragon 32 where I worked back then (Radio/TV) shop, can't remember the price though I persuaded our service manager to buy some logic chips as I had convinced him that I could design and build a sampling 'scope! with it..well after a lot of faffing around I managed to get it to display audio waveforms up to a limited frequency (not very high, Nyquist and all that) he said it would never catch on, the same happened when the first sattalite dishes first came out (the 2 meter diameter ones) I think there were only two "birds" up then, I told the sales manager that this is the future and he laughed, however my immediate boss had faith and ordered a couple of systems up, I was probably one of the first engineers to install one of these things in our area, I remember reinforcing the first customers flat roof to make it more rigid and climbing up with the dish, an inclinometer, compass and looking for the sun at 1 o'clock, trying to find the two sattalites, happy days! Bought an all singing/dancing computor job not long after Windows 95 came out, it was a Packard Bell, It too was over a grand with the printer and a scanner, it came with loads of software though, I bought my present Acer a couple of years ago and there was hardly any software with it, I guess that's in the same vien as Apple and Aps.

Lawrence.

[Paula A]

Just a little thought on dvd's and computers.
An old black xbox (£10-15) will play them a treat (and I can tell you how to hack them in minutes so you don't ned a dongle or remote control).. but my point.. they have a not quite standard 766MHz coppermine pentium3 chip and 64MB's of ram.. I have played dvd's successfully o systems as slow as 333 (cyrix) with again 64MB's of the old ram stuff.. The important thing I found was the FSB clock speed.. 100MHz wasn't enough.. 133 was crucial.. so P133 ram not P100 in that junker..

[Radio Fixer]

My Epson Stylus Photo R300, 6 colour printer produces stunning prints not that I do many. I always buy Epson inks for it as the quality is so much better compared to refilled ones used by a friend with the same printer. Also, when I was working we tried refills and had problems with blocked jets so to me its not worth the risk. I dont know how old the printer is now... 10 years at a guess so it pays off for me.

Epson ink technology is fantastic and in accelarated life tests prints are said to be still good after the equivalent of 200 years. But as always I wanted to prove this to myself... so I printed off a test print, on Epson Glossy Photo paper and my friend did the same on cheapo paper and the refills (Cartridge World) and I hung them up in a sunny window and we watched what happened. Fron the start the Epson ones were better, most noticable in the dark colours and blacks. A year later the Epson were still good, with slight changes, but the cheapos were finished. So you get what you pay for.

The price and profit gets knocked out of hardware so maybe the makers have to claw some back on the consumables. I always buy my cartidges from a Just Ink and Paper in the Channel Islands and its < £60 for the six.

Most of my pictures get put onto DVD and made into slide shows.

Gary