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.

In the end I chose a specification (based on my budget and a variety of quotes) and went with who would give me it for the least money and allow the most customisation.  So for my spec:

I went with an Intel Core Duo 2 Processor.  Having been an AMD user, I constantly felt that wherever I turned something better was there and I couldn't get it because of the chipset of a motherboard or other reason like being too much effort.  So having discussed it with people more in the know than myself a Core 2 Duo it is.  It is a 6600 which has two 3.4mhz processing cores so it should be fast.  I plumped for 2GB of RAM and my Motherboad still has 2 empty slots that if need be I will be using.  A 320GB hard drive and an Nvidia/Asus EN7900GS (upgraded form a 7600GT due to lack of stock!!). Oh the Motherboard is an MSI P695 Neo.

I profess I am no hardware exper but I believe this to be a good mid-high range spec that will be realtively easy to upgrade when required in the future! (And when I get my feelance work bringing in extra cash!)

I also took the opportunity to get a MS Action Pack, which for a subscriptiion (annual fee) and being a small (although very new) business gets me Windows and MS Office (Vista and Office 2007 will come at the end of the month) and SQL Server Standard (database for development) and other development tools.  This is great and I would recommend it for small businesses!  

With no major hitches in the build and despite a short delay in delivery, the machine seems to be working grand.  There was a small graphics issue where the card capped its power ouput because a secondary power cable wasn;t connected up.  Fortunately the guys at PCOption included sucha connector and in five minutes it was dealt with!

We will see how it performs under the stresses of SQL Server and Visual Studio and maybe the odd game or two!