Should you buy or upgrade your PCs?

Westcountry Business can provide a wide range of brand name hardware and computer equipment at competitive prices. Anything from mice to monitors, including a full range of networking equipment, printers, scanners - even consumable items like CD-Rs and Printer Cartridges. Whatever your requirements, just call for independent advice and a no-obligation quotation.

Buying a new PC?

In addition, we build and supply our own range of PCs. This means that we can supply PCs specified to clients individual requirements. Maybe you only need one PC in the office to have a CD-RW drive - why pay for a CD-RW or DVD in the others when a standard CD-Rom will do? Do you need some machines with flat screens where space is a problem, but are happy with a standard monitor elsewhere? Perhaps you want to treat yourself to a wireless keyboard and mouse to free up your desk space, but still want the same basic PC as the rest of the office?

Or maybe you just want a supplier to deliver you your computers with your software already installed, rather than having to do it all yourself? In any case, with prices for complete systems, including Windows XP pro - or Windows 98 or 2000 if you prefer - from £450, you can be flexible and still save money.

Have you thought about an Upgrade?

In many cases, you may already have enough PCs but the ones you have are now a little slow or unreliable and so you're thinking - "Time for a new one".

You may be right, but its worth thinking about what you will do with the old one first. If you are thinking of replacing it, is there any other use for it in the business - maybe as a spare in case of failure? However, if its not up to 'active service' for you, its probably not much use to anyone else - so don't hold out too much hope for a good second hand price.

There is some hope, though. Its probably not completely useless. It may be old and slow, but just because it takes some time to think about things doesn't mean that the monitor isn't still good enough, or the keyboard, or even the CD-Rom drive or hard disk. So why pay for all these things again in a new PC, just to throw away perfectly serviceable items?

Inside the PC, the bits that make it 'tick' are the Motherboard (or Main Board), the Processor (eg. Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon etc) and the memory. Normally these need to be replaced together, but - and this depends on the type of PC you have and so may not always be the case - you can insert a new Motherboard/Processor/Memory combination into your existing system to get a 'new' PC for a fraction of the cost of a complete system.

Before upgrading, a computer would need to be checked to make sure what was required, but with prices for such a upgrade, including fitting, starting from £195 it can be a cheap way of getting what would be effectively a new computer - and it saves you the job of disposing of the old one!