Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/160329

Quad core. 1GB. 160GB HDD.

£199? Sounds good

Jesus. If only it wasn't ebuyer.

To be fair I find Ebuyer to be quite good although as discussed before, when I had my card details stolen the lady from the fraud department of Natwest did say that they seemed to be a common factor in alot of cases around that time.

But that aside, that server is probably going to be fairly shite. Yes the spec if OK but what about the power supply or the quality of the motherboard?

Back when I worked for (not ITV - Ed) we had hundreds of Dell server boxes. It was unheard of for one to go pop, likewise we had some Intel boxes that just went on and on and on. Will a 200 quid box (OK so it's discounted) give that kind of service? I doubt it.

It is a good price but it depends what you want it for. If you just want a basic server you can pick up reconditioned boxes of a lower spec but a far higher build quality. Certain brand boxes will just go on forever if run in a server room environment (i.e clean and properly cool).

eBuyer are far better than they used to be.

I don't care. Even though it was something like 7 years ago. They were that bad.

I've ordered several grands worth of kit off them over the past 4 years and they've been dandy. Returns have been well handled as well. The credit card issue, well that's only what the lady said to me.

Now the once great Dabs on the other hand are now an utter shower of idiots I refuse to deal with unless forced. Went to shit after they closed their Bracknell branch down. Was always nice to go and pick up the kit in person. Or even the old Woking branch when I got my Psion 3a!

Scan are great but don't always have the range of products. Although they do usually have the Lacie Firewire 800 drives that Ebuyer don't stock.

That's HPs top quality range. It's pretty much the lowest spec box you can get, but every part in there will be pretty much top drawer.

I've been out of the game for a while now, but certainly a few years back HP's were not held in high regard where I worked. Perhaps things have changed but even with the discount I can't see how they can have quality components in there.

But then again I'm four years out of date on what a server should cost anyway and perhaps HP are shifting these boxes out at cost to get rid?

Older HPs always were pretty shit - but the ProLiants are the Compaq range that obviously became HP when they took them over. Great kit.

Interestingly I had my card details stolen earlier this year, not long after my first ebuyer purchase. Coincidence?

Unlikely as this was a year ago. I think these things get jumped on pretty quick. The people who had the details purchased a phone from a mobile phone shop not a million miles from Ebuyers HQ. Our lawyers point out that this could be coincidence mind.

My bosses got HP workstations late last year, nice bits of kit. Core 2 Quad jobbies. Quiet, very, very fast and not crashy or explodey at all (so far). They paid quite a lot more than that.