Best place to buy a desktop PC please?

My dad is after one, not expensive, just run of the mill. Seen some good ones advertised in the national press from Dell, but you come to order them from their website, and the price magically rises by £100! Saw one in particular for £329, great machine. In paper it says VAT has been included, and there is also free shipping and handling. Yet you come to order it, and they decide to charge VAT and delivery </p>

He is very loathe to actually phone them up as he has heard various reports of them trying to convince you to pay extra for various things like software backups etc.</p>

Any help would be truly appreciated, its a bloomin minefield out there.</p>

 

Had no problems with phoning Dell

We phoned them from the ferry once 'cos we saw an offer in the paper as we were going on holiday and they gave us a reference and agreed to give us the offer price when we got back, even though it had expired by then. I only ever buy Dell desktops and servers now. All great stuff and top rate as far as build quality goes. I've heard support is not great though which may be an issue in this case.

 

Well, that does sound good mate

</p>

Any ideas how long they take to deliver though?</p>

 

Not massively quick

And the tracking system seems to go "Waiting in pre-assembly . . . Waiting in pre-assembly . . . Waiting in pre-assembly . . . Outside your house". Worth waiting for in my opinion, though.

If you want quick delivery then Misco have always been pretty good on that front for most stuff, including laptops, although I don't know if they do desktops under the same terms.

If you're looking for something cheaper then I've heard good things about Acer laptops lately and their desktops may also be worth looking at, but to be honest it's Dell all the way for my money on desktops and servers.

 

by the way

to get the price down you have to change the 'cover' (warrenty) bit to the lowest form, i think its 90 day collect and return. </p>

Also try using the small business section of dells website as things tend to be cheaper on there.</p>

Another tip is to ring up and ask to cancel after you've ordered. Say something like that you've seen a similar spec computer for cheaper elsewhere and they'll offer you some money off your dell if you keep it.</p>