Richard Lennox

I have finally got round to upgrading my home/development machine.  Having taken the decision to accept freelance work I understood it was necessary to upgrade both my hardware and software to enable me to do this without other complications.  After all, my "old" machine is at least five and a half years old.  Yeah, it has been patched, upgraded and generally brutalised but it was falling apart and I was putting up with slowing down hardware that made it more economical to start from scratch than to repace part after part.  Replacing parts s al well and good but a solid foundation (motherboard and processor) is required.  A five year old motherboard and processor doesn't cut it!  And that doesn't even get into the state of the hard drive and the rubbish that is on there and needin tidied up.

So with my best foot forward I researched custom build companies. Forum after forum four companies came up.  Not always in a positive way, in fact as with most things you will find people complain about a company but if they are satisfied with the company often don;t bother.  It is from "hardcore" forum posters that comment on such complaints or questions that I gleamed most of the important stuff.  The complaints often prrovide more of an insight than anything else.

Out of the four companies I definately knew of two: Dell and Evesham. A third I had heard of but knew nothing about was pcspecialist.co.uk.  The fourth and eventual winner of my business on sheer cost alone was pcoption.co.uk. Of course I looked under every broken web server for other sellers but eventually everywhere I looked was recommendations (or at times the least compliants) were about these.  They are all abit of a muchness but the two brand presences priced themselves out of the running as the most expensive.