So the first Z200 arrived, and apart from some minor niggles with the network card, it's worked flawlessly and with great speed. No more grinding hard drive or crashes from too little RAM. And it boots up in less than 20 seconds!
The old P4 was gutted, data ported over, hard drive wiped, and I even managed to get £30 from someone at work for the base unit. I reused the monitor of course.
Well that was the first PC ("Proxima" - now replaced by "Deimos"). But how did I get on with the second? After a month or so of frantically selling rare Doctor Who toys on eBay I had finally built up enough credit in my PayPal account to afford another Z200...only to be told by Bargain Hardware that they had no stock left!
This was a real blow, as the Z200s were by far the cream of the crop. Anything cheaper than them was (to my mind) far too underpowered, whereas the next model up (the Z400) was out of my price range. Then for some reason I put "HP Z200" into the search field of eBay and what should come up ? An almost identical base unit, only with an i5 instead of an i3, and installed with Windows 7 Professional instead of Home Premium. Bidding was up to £90, with 5 days to go, and this guy wanted £15 postage, compared to Bargain Hardware's free delivery. So...if I knocked £15 off of the price I'd paid for the last Z200, that came to about £230. I added a bit for the upgrade in CPU and OS, and placed a bid for £237. Which immediately saw me as the highest bidder at £92.
Over the next few days bidders came and went, increasing the bid by £10 or so, only to be immediately trumped by me with my hidden top bid of £237. Then came the day, another round of frantic bidding, and I was the winner - £225.
The PC arrived a few days later, with Windows 7 Pro already installed, and I could finally gut the last of the XP Pentium 4s ("Alpha") and port the data over to Deimos's new brother - Phobos. The same spec as Deimos, but with that little CPU edge. Nice.
The old P4 was gutted, data ported over, hard drive wiped, and I even managed to get £30 from someone at work for the base unit. I reused the monitor of course.
Well that was the first PC ("Proxima" - now replaced by "Deimos"). But how did I get on with the second? After a month or so of frantically selling rare Doctor Who toys on eBay I had finally built up enough credit in my PayPal account to afford another Z200...only to be told by Bargain Hardware that they had no stock left!
This was a real blow, as the Z200s were by far the cream of the crop. Anything cheaper than them was (to my mind) far too underpowered, whereas the next model up (the Z400) was out of my price range. Then for some reason I put "HP Z200" into the search field of eBay and what should come up ? An almost identical base unit, only with an i5 instead of an i3, and installed with Windows 7 Professional instead of Home Premium. Bidding was up to £90, with 5 days to go, and this guy wanted £15 postage, compared to Bargain Hardware's free delivery. So...if I knocked £15 off of the price I'd paid for the last Z200, that came to about £230. I added a bit for the upgrade in CPU and OS, and placed a bid for £237. Which immediately saw me as the highest bidder at £92.
Over the next few days bidders came and went, increasing the bid by £10 or so, only to be immediately trumped by me with my hidden top bid of £237. Then came the day, another round of frantic bidding, and I was the winner - £225.
The PC arrived a few days later, with Windows 7 Pro already installed, and I could finally gut the last of the XP Pentium 4s ("Alpha") and port the data over to Deimos's new brother - Phobos. The same spec as Deimos, but with that little CPU edge. Nice.
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