Reliable desktop manufacturer in UK now?

[housepiglet]

About 6 months ago my PC died and I replaced it with a Dell running Vista. What a horrible mistake that was. I'm thinking of replacing it with a different make, running XP.

I had difficulty at the time trying to ID a highly-regarded desktop manufacturer readily available over here. Can anyone make any suggestions, please?

[whitedragon551]

CyberPowerPC, ,iBuyPower, or you can build your own. Building your own will get you better performance for less.

[loli22]

i strongly advise you to go with hp and by from them you might get a free delivery, very reliable machine and good customer service.
what's your budget anyway?

[housepiglet]

Thanks, both of you. Things have moved on so fast that I've never even heard of CyberPowerPC or iBuyPower. Naturally I've heard of HP, though.

I suppose the budget's ideally somewhere in the £500 range. I could pay more, but I'd rather not if I don't have to.

As well as the usual internet and a bit of word processing, my main requirements are a PC fast enough to a bit of video editing (I use Ulead Video Studio) and to record and edit music, by which I mean that I have a guitar and from time to time I like to record it into the PC, add tracks, process it etc. When I bought the last one, and told the young woman in the shop that I wanted to record music, I think she thought I meant rip CDs to iTunes, because she recommended something that doesn't have a proper sound card and I was stupid enough to buy it. Then Vista attempted to hide what passes for a (built in) sound card from me. Nightmare.

Thanks again :)

[lodore]

i sergest buying from cyberpower systems (http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/)
i brought my pc from them last christmas. great companie, great computers.
i got 32bit vista to start with and then last week i wanted 64bit vista media so i rung them up and all i paid was the postage £5 came next day.
they have a great forum (http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/forum/)
just post a message at their forum with budget and what you want to do with it and they will spec you a system.

[whitedragon551]

-{ Quote: "i strongly advise you to go with hp and by from them you might get a free delivery, very reliable machine and good customer service.
what's your budget anyway?" }-

HP is a joke. They have turned into a horrible computer company. Their customer server is next to non-existant. Ill tell you a story about my HP laptop.

I paid $1300 for this HP DV6258SE 2 years ago. It had a GeForce Go 6150 integrated graphics card, 2 Gbs RAM, Vista 32-bit OS, AMD Turion TL-56 1.8GHz processor. Good for your eversday school tasks and older games.

Well the first laptop I had in that model I returned within the 14 day PC return policy at Best Buy. It was a dud. It worked for a day or 2 and stopped working after that. Kept getting BSODs at every start up. Got the same laptop.

One the second laptop 16 days into it the HD crashed. To bad for me it was outside the 14 day return policy and I had to send it to HP for the manufacturers warranty. They made me send them the laptop so they could put the HD in even though you only take out 2 screws and pop it in.

A few months later the wireless card went bad and they needed to replace the entire motherboard. It stopped picking up wireless signals in the on position.

A week or so after that the 2nd HD failed. I got another new HD.

A month or so after that the new HD failed again. This time I was pissed and made them send me the HD before I sent the laptop in.

Last but not least about 2 weeks ago my fiance was using it and when she was done she turned it off and put it in the laptop bag and set it in the closest were it goes. A week later she pulled it out to use it and it wouldnt turn on. We tried with AC and battery, battery only, and AC only and nothing. They had to replace the heating plate and the motherboard AGAIN as well as fix the screen iteself.

For the little over a year I have had it, it has spent atleast 6 months in HPs tech lab being fixed. I had so many problems that I requested a free year of warranty. All that for a $1300 laptop. It should have never had a problem to begin with.

I moved from HP to Asus and Ive never had a BSOD on my Asus since Ive had it and its been over 4-5 months.

[Pseudo]

I suggest you build your own. Otherwise, BEAST Computers (http://www.beastcomputers.co.uk/) is good.