We hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year. We are now closed until the 3rd of January 2019 but hope to see you in the new year.

Are Black Friday laptops worth buying?

At this time of year, the big electrical retailers offer laptops at seemingly very good prices. However, some of the very cheapest ones offer poor value for money.

As an extreme example we found a laptop being advertised for £99 brand new. This seems too good to be true and it is. The problem is the specifications are very poor, it has 32GB of storage which is very little, and the type of storage offered eMMC is very unreliable. It also only has 2GB of RAM which is less than most average smart phones these days. The processor is also extremely slow meaning the overall experience of using this laptop would be extremely frustrating. It might be OK as a word processor but that is about it.

In our experience you can’t buy a decent new laptop for less than £350 as cheaper ones offer far too many compromises which, so they offer poor value for money. At the lower price range refurbished laptops offer far better value for money.

This is a question we sometimes get asked.   The cost of new machines is rising sharply due to inflation and component shortages (memory) what we are finding is that while cheap computers are still being offered by the major retailers but the quality and specification has declined sharply.  Most laptops under £400 come with extremely under powered processors and slow hard drives.

Most refurbished machines will be as fast as a new machine costing twice as much if not faster.  We mostly only supply grade A refurbished machines which are more less as good as new.  These machines come with a fully licensed copy of Windows 10 and are fully tested. They are corporate quality machines and are usually better made than domestic class machines found in the major retailers.  The cost of a refurbished desktop can be as little as £180 (for a base unit) including full data transfer and on-site setup.  In order to offer the best selection we do not stock any refurbished machines but we order them at a discounted rate for next day delivery.  Refurbished machines also have an environmental benefit as manufacturing computers is not particularly kind to the environment.

All our refurbished machines come with the same 1 year warranty we offer with new machines.

Some of the benefits of buying a refurbished machine from us:-

• All machines come with a 1 year warranty
• Fully tested
• Most machines are Grade A meaning they are in nearly new condition unless otherwise stated.
• All machines come with Windows 10 unless Windows 7 is especially requested.
• A choice of entry level systems to high end I5 based computers, all the less than most new machines.
• Quick turn around time
• Full onsite setup including data transfer where possible included in the price
• Corporate quality machines supplied such as Lenovo Thinkpads and Dell Optiplex machines.
• Fully tested by the suppliers, we also do a range of tests to make sure nothing was missed before supplying to the end user.

If you have an old machine lying around we can bring new life into it for a lot less than a new machine.  With the cost of new machines increasing due to varies factors bring older machines back into life has never made more sense.  We carry out a full hardware test before carrying out any work so we will inform you in advance if we feel that the machine isn’t worth saving.

Some of the things we do:-

• Full hardware test (hard drive, temperatures etc)
• Full tune up
• Remove any viruses and malware that are found (multiple scans and manual detection)
• Patch all out of date software to the latest versions were possible
• Run and repair windows update if required.
• Install the upgrade drivers where necessary.
• Remove temporary files and other unnecessary files taking up space.

All for just £45.00

Still using Windows Vista? The extended support for Windows Vista ends on the 11th of April 2017. This means after this date while Vista will continue to work there will be no more security updates and it will no longer be considered safe to use.

If you are still running Windows Vista speak to us about special offers on new and refurbished machines. We take the stress out of buying new computers. All our refreshed systems are extremely high quality and come with a 12 month warranty.