It's PC Upgrade Time! (Part 1)

 

OK, so April is fast approaching, bringing with it the Apocalypse of Windows XP End Of Support.  Yes, after April 8th my two XP machines will no longer receive Security Updates, leading to (if the tech community are to be believed) a veritable smorgasbord of vulnerable PCs for the criminal fraternity to feast upon. Nom Nom Nom. 

Plus as P4s with 2Gb of RAM they're both pretty long in the tooth anyways.  So now would be a good time to upgrade, for two main reasons.  Firstly the Home PC market has taken a bit of a knock recently while everyone goes Smartphone & Tablet mad, so prices are pretty low at present.  Secondly come April there may be a bit of a rush at least from the Corporate side as companies suddenly realise how little time they've got to to migrate from XP.  This will most likely result in a price hike for PCs and components between now and April.

So what do I need and where's the best (OK, read "cheapest") place for me to shop?  Well I don't need complete systems, as I'm keeping the monitors, keyboards and mice.  Both mini-towers have a brace of DVDRWs each, and two of those are SATA.  Plus I have a spare 500GB SATA hard drive from when I bumped one of Supernova's drives up to a terabyte.

Sorry, Supernova is the name of my linux server – a little 3-drive Athlon 64 Dual Core running 8GB RAM that holds my video and music files.  I tend to give all my PCs and shares astronomy-related names.  My smartphone is Apophis, my tablet is Sirius, and our two laptops are Luna and Oberon (satellites, you see?).

The two P4s, Alpha and Proxima (though the rest of the family refer to them as the "Left-Hand" and "Right-Hand" computers) are both 32-bit with AGP graphics and DDR RAM, so there's very little I can scavenge.  The hard drives are both around 160GB IDE so even if I got them running on a SATA-only board they'd be slow and there'd be hardly any space left after a full Windows 7 installation.  Alpha's  Intel motherboard does have two SATA interfaces, so I'll be reusing the two DVDRW's from there, but Proxima will have to be completely replaced.

So I'm looking at two base units, with 500+ GB hard drives, 8GB RAM, a 1GB graphics card, and two DVDRWs each (though I may just share the two SATAs between both for now).  But I'll only have to buy 1 HDD.  Let's shop around.

I have basically 3 avenues here:

• Online vendor
• Local shop
• Online ex-Corporate dealer

In the first two cases I'll be doing the build myself, but the third option will get me a reconditioned re-used base unit from a corporation similar to the one I currently work for.  OK there won't be a full year's warranty, and it'll be second-hand, but I've been there before and it's not really an issue.  That's where my two P4s came from and they've lasted a good five years or more.

For online vendors I looked at Aria PC Technology.  I've ordered kit from them before and although they're not that cheap, they're also not fly-by-night box shifters. They've been around for a while and I trust them. They have a good range of kit and their components all have comments from potential buyers.

There's quite a few local computer shops in Nottingham/Long Eaton ranging from the rock-solid to the dubious, but I picked three that I've had long-term dealings with and who I trust:

• CompuPlus Direct in Nottingham 
• MD Computers in Long Eaton 
• Web Systems Online in Bulwell

I've bought either kit or full computers from all of these at one time or another (Supernova came from MD about 3-4 years ago), they've all been around for several years, and they seem to know what they're talking about.

Now, online ex-Corporate is a bit of a new ball-game for me, and I must say it's one that's looking very competitive at the moment.  I put this down to the low price of components at present, meaning large organisations can afford to upgrade for less, so they do it more often, making hay while the sun shines.  This means that there's a plethora of kit that's only a few years old flooding the market (look on eBay for "Dell optiplex" for example).

So there's my options.  The next thing to do is knock up some sample builds and compare prices.

To Be Continued...