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Custom Built Computers.

Why Do We Believe Our Machines Are Better?

• We believe the machines we build offer superior value compared to the mass produced machines sold by many high street retailers or those produced by many of the industry giants.
• Whilst big brand machines are usually built down to a price target, our machines are built up to a performance and quality target.
• All out products are built using industry standard components, offering full compliance with industry standards. This helps ensure trouble free operation and easy upgrade paths for your machine. Many top brand machines do not offer this.
• When you buy from us, all you dealings with be with the person who actually builds your machine. 

There are a number of area's in which we believe our machines are better than many others.

Industry Standard Components:

Firstly, many of the "big box shifters" use proprietary components in their machines. The vast majority of machines today are built around the ATX standard, (A newer standard called BTX is slowly becoming available, but this is not widespread having little support at present) this helps to ensure that any component built to this standard is interchangeable with those of another manufacturer. Many of the larger manufacturers use proprietary components which do not fully comply with this standard, as a result, should you desire to upgrade the machine you may have to return to the original manufacturer to obtain a compatible part.
We believe that if you wish to upgrade, you should have the choice of deciding who should upgrade the machine, and what brand and specification of component's are used. In the same manner, if a proprietary component should fail (after your warranty period) you may need to have the parts sourced from the same original manufacturer, usually at a far greater cost than the industry standard equivalent. As a small manufacturer we clearly do not have access to such non-standard or proprietary parts, nor would we ever want such access. We believe it is far better to have a machine built using industry standard components, with no hidden surprises.

Operating Systems (Windows):

Increasingly PC manufacturers supply their machines with  recovery or rescue disc's, rather than a full original Windows disc. These disc's contain your operating system (Windows), device drivers and often other software. They will enable you to set up your machine with all relevant devices correctly installed etc, it makes setting up the PC a simple and usually painless affair. Yet we (and many others) feel this is far from a good thing. Why? Well it will set up the machine in the manner the manufacturer sees fit, not the way you want it, and not necessarily in the way that best suits your needs. Many of these utilise a hidden partition on your hard drive (depriving you of disk space you've paid for), so if your hard drive fails and needs to be replaced how do you transfer these files to your hard drive? The simple answer is you can't, the failure of this one component could therefore leave you stranded, missing vital files, with purchasing a new copy of Windows as your only option! If you later decide to upgrade your PC, the rescue discs may not have the required files to support your new device's, as they were not part of your original setup.
And it doesn't end there, when contacting their support, you will often be told to insert your recovery disc and follow the prompts onscreen, this can effectively reset you machine to the state it left the factory in, often wiping out all your files and settings, removing any other software you have since installed.
And it can get worse, it may turn out that you had a problem with faulty hardware rather than software, but by then you could have already lost all your files for no good reason.
Another difficulty emerging is the practice of not supplying any recovery discs at all, this is unfortunately becoming more and more common. In this situation the manufacturer will provide a facility for you to create a recovery disc yourself using software already installed on the PC. This creates an array of new potential pitfalls, most users will not perform this procedure, so when a situation arises whereby they actually need such a recovery disc they may not be able to access the software in order to create one. Additionally, the software often allows you only one attempt to create your recovery disc, should anything go wrong you could easily be left with no recovery disc and little prospect of creating/obtaining one. Even if you do successfully create the recovery disc, it will still suffer the pitfalls associated with recovery versus full Windows discs as detailed previously.
Still not enough reasons to avoid recovery discs? Well you're paying for a copy of Windows, you have a right to an actual Windows disc. The right to receive the full product you have paid for, the right to be able to set-up and configure your machine the way you want. Whilst the supply of these rescue discs is a legal method endorsed, and indeed encouraged by Microsoft, we do not believe they are in the consumers interest. We always supply proper, full, original, genuine Windows discs, component driver discs, and any others required for your new PC.

Upgrade Potential:

Should you decide to upgrade your machine at a later date, a number of obstacles can arise. Some of these have been covered above, but it doesn't end there. Most machines are built to a price, this often limits the upgrade path available for any given machine, as many of the components may already be stretched to their limit, power supply's may not have enough spare capacity to reliably run additional drives or a more demanding graphics card, the motherboard may not be capable of accepting a faster processor (CPU), it may not be possible to upgrade your graphics card to the latest available models.... The list goes on.
If you are buying the very latest, fastest, top spec machine available then it may not be possible to ensure every possible upgrade, after all, who can offer a 100% assurance that the machine can accept a component that is not even available on the market yet? However with any other level of machine it should not be an unreasonable expectation to be able to upgrade later. We always strive to ensure our machines will not have any such limitations. Our machines wherever possible will always have a greater upgrade potential than the vast majority of the big brand alternatives

Build Quality:

There are other areas in which we believe our products can often be better, for example.......

(some of the following items contain technical terms, if you would like clarification on any of the items discussed on the pages, please give us a call, we would be happy to go through them with you)

Audio pass thru cable. This enables you to listen to a CD without processing the sound thru your CPU, it passes the audio signal directly from the CD/DVD drive to your sound card. These are not always fitted by every system manufacturer - we always fit one for you.

Whilst many newer PC's are fitted with SATA Drives, IDE drives are still often fitted, CD/DVD drives are still generally IDE. Many manufactures will use one IDE channel to support two devices, this saves them a few cents as they do not have to fit a second cable. Wherever possible will will fit each IDE device with a dedicated cable and therefore a dedicated channel, thus maximising the performance of  all such devices.

Hard drive configuration. Most manufacturers supply your hard drive as one large unit, this was fine in the days of 10GB hard drives, but for a long time now partitioning a hard drive has been considered best practice. This is the practice of operationally splitting a hard drive into two or more partitions. Only one drive is physically fitted, but it appears to windows as a number of drives. Why is this important? Because if you store all your data i.e. photo's files documents etc, on a separate partition to windows, it adds a degree of security to them. Should your machine ever have to be reset to factory and have its operating system re-installed, storing your data separately could mean you do not loose any of it as you would if the hard disk was not partitioned.
Note: This is not a substitute for backing up your data, as physical damage to, or complete failure of the hard disk may result in loss of data regardless of partitioning.

Thermal paste. This is the substance that is sandwiched between your CPU (Pentium, Athlon etc) and its heatsink. New heatsinks and cooling assemblies will always have some of this supplied/fitted, usually a silicon based type, and that's what virtually every system builder uses (i.e. the one supplied with the heatsink), however we don't, we take the time to remove this and apply a high quality, highly thermal conductive silver based compound instead. Why do we do this? Well although it takes us a few minutes extra to do, and adds a bit to the cost, it does provide very real benefits. It increases the heat transfer rate from the CPU to the heatsink, thus enabling your CPU to run on average 2 to 6 ^oC cooler. This will increase the life of the CPU, and on today's systems with smart fan speed control  allows the fan to rotate a little slower thus making the system a little quieter, a little cooler and with a fraction less power consumption (It may only be a fraction, but in these days of energy awareness every little helps).

Some of the above may only appear to be small differences, but they are differences we feel show the care and quality we put into all our work.

The car comparison.

If you were to buy a car purely on the printed specification it might be hard to justify the price difference between manufacturers. For example one could check out two different models, both have 5 doors, a 1.6l engine, fuel injection, 5 speed gearbox, stereo CD player, etc etc. Yet one is nearly twice as expensive as the other, why? Well perhaps one is a Toyota whilst the other is a Lada, very similar on paper, but very different in terms of build quality, performance, longevity and ultimately value for money.
The same can also apply to computers, there's a lot more to choosing a PC then just the price.

Want Any More Reasons?

We build PC's primarily because we are enthusiasts. This is not to say its not a business, but we are not interested purely in notching up sales. We need little in the way of advertisement, as the vast majority of our business comes from "word of mouth", and that's just the way we like it. We're quite happy to personally discuss your requirements to ensure any machine we supply correctly meets your needs. We have no interest in growing into so large a company that we cannot offer a personal service, as stated before we are enthusiasts, we would rather stay that way and offer you, the customer the best possible value.

We may not always compete with others on price, but they rarely compete with us on quality

Read examples of the problems we've encountered in our workshop due to the practice of the "Big Box Shifters"

Thanks for reading.

Site Last Updated: June 12, 2010

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