Getting a better deal?

You may be tempted by other online offers, which on the face of it may appear cheaper. But before you jump in, here are some key points you should bear in mind.

General quality of components   Squirrel Solutions use only top quality branded components in our PC systems. Many other vendors use cheap unbranded cases, motherboards etc, which are prone to fail, leaving you with expensive downtime and repairs.

On-board graphics   Around 90% of the off-the-shelf PC systems we've seen use on-board graphics. The problem here is twofold; firstly the chipset is usually something very basic such as SiS, and secondly on-board graphics actually takes main memory from the rest of the system. This will noticably slow down the computer as the graphics chip takes all the memory bandwidth, and the reduced memory leads to poorer performance. We always fit a standard AGP graphics card from a reputable manufacturer such as ATi or nVidia.

Optical drives   Our systems include a separate CD-ROM or DVD-ROM and CD writer for best performance. Other systems tend to supply a DVD/CD-RW combo unit, which is much slower.

ATA-133   All our motherboards and hard drives support ATA-133. Many other systems only provide an ATA-100 drive, limiting system performance.

Memory   We fit 512MB of DDR memory as standard, which can be expanded to 1.5GB.

Operating system   Although our starting price does not include a Windows license, don't fall into the XP Home trap. Many of our competitors' systems are supplied with XP Home, which you pay for whether you use or not. If you want to use the PC on a corporate network, you have to use either XP Professional or Windows 2000 - which you have to purchase on top of the system cost. And if you want to run, say, Linux, you still have to purchase a copy of Windows regardless. We will supply a machine without an OS, or even pre-loaded with Linux or NetBSD.

Convinced yet? Go back to the Custom PC page.