Amazed at Dixons PC prices

I just went to Dixons to have a laugh and was amazed when I saw Celeron packages with 256MB RAM, a 15" TFT monitor, 40GB HD, shared graphics, cheapo digital camera (probably worth £30 max), cheap printer for £899.

That package would probably cost me £500 to build including a legal version of XP. What was also staggering is that the speakers were cheap £1 Ebuyer things, and the TFT monitor was unbranded and can be picked up retail for £170.

I am also amazed at Time selling base units with XP and only 128MB RAM with shared graphics! which means there is only 96MB RAM spare. I would not like to run XP with anything less than 256MB.

 

Yep, sure sounds like you had a giggle of a time!

(I run XP PRO just fine on 192MB of RAM)

 

i run xp pro on 192mb and a 400mhz pII. it occasionally runs a bit slow but i think that's more down to the 2.5 meg system partition than anything else as the hard drive thrashes when it does. otherwise is just fine.
dixons is extracting the urine at that price though - even toys r us are cheaper and better specced.
cheers


julian

 

2.5 Mb eh? You couldnt even get Win 3.11 on that

If the hard drive thrashes it means it is low on memory, using virtual memory (i.e. your hard disk). Also, if your hard disk is badly fragmented, it will make it worse again, as your hard drive then has to scan back and forth across the disk to read/write to it.

 

doh, i mean gb of course. must remember before typing engage.... er whats that thing again?

i haven't defragged the drive... ever. so that may be somethign to try. seeing as the machine is about 5 years old!
cheers


julian

 

256MB of RAM is the bare minimum for WinXP for me. One of my systems at work is a P3/933 with 256MB RAM. Graphics is shared and it's got a crappy 5400RPM HDD. Runs Win2K like a snail on valium! My P3/733 that I had about 3 or 4 years ago ran far faster than that! I think it had 256MB of RAM and a 7200RPM hard disk in it. Graphics was a Matrox G400 with 32MB, I think.

My main home system has 1GB of RAM in it and XP runs like a dream. Julian - defragging should give you a noticable improvement in performance, especially if it's never been defragged in 5 years. Hard drives have got faster too - I tend to use 7200RPM models with an 8MB cache on them with good results.

 

:yikes: :yikes:

That's a FREE upgrade there already then

Nsherin: "Runs Win2K like a snail on valium! " - he he he - cool! I bet it's not as slow as my Athlon 750/256mb RAM (XP) - 4 years old, sluggish, 7200 HDD is the only good bit about it now!

Anyone got a mid 2-3gigs spec mobo/ram/case going cheap? Need to upgrade as I need more speed so I can get into music writing...

 

domfjbrown, I might be able to beat that spec . I've got XP Pro running on an Athlon 500 (one of the original Slot A chips) overclocked for the last 5-6 years to 700 with 256Mb ram with a 7200 rpm HDD. XP runs fine as long as I keep the HDD defragged and don't expect too much from it.

 

well, i've just analysed my c & d drives - pretty bad - a sea of red so i'll be defragging tonight. thanks guys.
cheers


julian

 

With the price of ram as it is why do you people piss around with so little, I have 1.2 gigs here.

 

Maybe not everybody has £100 to spend on 1GB RAM, oh I forgot I on a HIFI Forum

Personaly I always have liked lots of RAM, I always find it makes a bigger difference than the processor within limits. A 2Ghz processor with 512MB RAM is always going to putperfrom a 3Ghz machine with just 128MB RAM for example. A typical windows session for me takes up around 300MB of physical RAM so 512MB is perfect as it gives me a bit of head room.

 

What the hell is a 'Windows Session?'

Its that the space between crashes?

 

Do I win the award for the slowest PC on the forum?

Pentium 233
64 meg ram
win 98 (recently upgraded from '95!)

come on if you think you're slow enough!!

 

I installed XP Pro a while back on my wife's old Sony Vaio laptop which was a 266Mhz with only 128Mb of RAM and it ran pretty well...a sight faster than the Win98 that was on it before .

My main machine now is a mere 933Mhz PIII with 512Mb of RAM. Since I don't use it for any software development anymore I don't really need much more than that (and it still plays the latest games like Splinter Cell 2 perfectly well). My laptop from work is a 2.4Ghz P4 with 1Gb of RAM....now that is phuking fast - compiles our entire 450 Java class project in just a couple of seconds

Michael.

 

I can beat that, I have a laptop with the same specification. PC I have just thrown a PII 266 in the bin its a compaq so its not really much use. I will try and salvage the CPU though. My sister is getting a nice Althlon XP 1800 once the parts arive.

 

I have sitting on top of the wardrobe, a P166 laptop with about 80MB RAM and 5GB hard disk. It's got Win95 on it. Not used it for ages. Bloody slow too....

Next new toys will be a new graphics card and a Pioneer DVD-A08 4x dual-layer DVD writer, I think.

 

I have a Commodore 64 with 64K RAM but I don't think that really counts. My digital TV box has a 166Mhz processor in it though and 16MB RAM, my first PC only had a 20Mhz 386 and 2MB RAM!

 

How about a ZX81 that still works? I've even got the 16K ram addon for it .
I'm waiting for the new batch of PCI express motherboards/gfx cards before I ditch my exisiting PC.

 

That beats my C64, I wonder if anybody here has a working ZX80? I doubt anybody could beat that.

 

aah but this is my only PC!! - anyone got a crapper computer that is their BEST machine??