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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 September 2023The old adage appears to remain true that if something sounds too good to be true it generally is.The media could not be loaded.
I have found it to be the case with this computer. I should have known that a sub 100 desktop was not going to be exactly everything it appeared.
Firstly the price is not bad at all. If you only want to check your emails, write up some school work and watch the odd youtube etc video - then go ahead, its' a bargain. if you want to be able to do more than one thing at once perhaps it's not quite the thing for you.
It arrived on time on the day that it said it would, however the box had a bit of a sag in the middle of it. Once opened it appeared that perhaps it had either been dropped or stood on (given the sag) and the keyboard itself had a complete crack across it rendering it unusable and only fit for the bin.
I immediatley contacted the seller who took 2 days to reply - by which time I had already purchased a new keyboard in order to try it out. To be fair they offered to send a replacement keyboard but did not offer to refund or even put money toards the one that I'd had to purchase in order to test that the computer actually worked in the first place as they hadn't gotten back.
After that it appeared to run ok - I formatted the hd rather than have the refurb companies version of windows set up so that it was all set up in 'my' way rather than theirs and it went smoothly.
The wifi dongle drops out frequently - only for a few seconds but enough to interupt what you're doing. It can be every few mins or every hour depending how it feels. It's very annoying. I've purchased a new one to see if it improves it that should arrive tomorrow. As i'm writing this it's just gone off for the third time since I began the review (all of 5 mins). the speed is attrocious too - fast.com is telling me I'm getting 800KBPS (that's kilobytes, not megabites - much smaller. Not even 1mb when I should be up to 900mb. Hopefully the new dongle should improve this!)
The monitor flickered and flashed on/off from purchase. Day 2 I bought a new VGA cable to see if it would work. It improved it and it has stopped 90 percent of it until this weekend (about 5 weeks from purchase) when the monitor would not work at all and kept turning itself off. I have purchased a new power kettle lead and - touch wood - this appears to have stopped some of it too, however I am considering purchasing a different monitor to try it on as it is infuriating to have to find the 'sweet spot' to put the wire in 6/10 times that you turn it on to stop it flickering.
The mouse can be a little hit and miss - but touch wood that appears to have stopped playing up recently.
The sound is awful, I purchased a new bluetooth dongle to be able to add headphones to it which makes it much better.
In short - it's cheap because it is approx 5 plus years old and tech has moved on a lot since then. Slowly but surely I'm having to purchase new add ons to try/replacement parts which are soon adding up. I would stay away and pay that bit more for a newer machine if honest.
Edit: it's been 2 months from purchase. The new wires helped the monitor work for a little while but the issue has begun again and is now worse so the monitor itself is the issue.
Incidentally i purchased a new WiFi dongle which did increase the speed to the speed of my fibre net... However it disconnected for seconds to a couple of minutes every 10 to 20 minutes which made watching stuff, shopping and uploading/downloading things a real chore.
