At first glance, a brand new PC for R1699 (incl. VAT) sounds very interesting. But an offer like this deserves scrutiny. More often than not, you will get a box which will not only not let you work properly, but also cost you more in the long run.

Most low-cost PCs come with low-cost components. Sometimes they are made by well-known manufacturers, just targeted for the low-cost market. In other cases a lot of no-name components are used. There is generally nothing wrong with that, but depending on which kind of parts has been used to what degree, it can have a significant impact on the reliability of the system. Low-cost components are made with low-cost, often second-quality chips and capacitors, which shorten the lifetime of the system. Such components break sooner, requiring replacement and causing additional expense.

Here's a short guide to identifying and judging a system before you buy it. Tis guide does not claim to be the ultimate solution, nor is it necessarily the only one. But it is written with several years of experience in the field of technical and hardware support.

You can't expect high-end performance from a low-cost PC. For most office work, that is secondary anyway, since the PC is idling most of the time. Such PCs often come with low-end CPUs, either Intel Celeron or AMD Duron/Sempron. Plenty punch for office work, but if there is any indication that you might need more CPU power for any purpose, be it number crunching or video editing, such a CPU is not the way to go.

Harddrive space is interesting if you do more than word processing. Most low-end PCs come with a 40GB harddrive, which is the absolute minimum available nowadays. Upsizing the harddrive is however inexpensive, and I recommend it for one simple reason: with a 40GB drive you can never be sure if it is actually new or if the manufacturer is using up old stock. That is the case for bigger harddrives too, but for a 40GB even more, because they are slowly being taken out of production.

That brings me to the last and most crucial point: the RAM. Many PC manufacturers especially in South Africa are selling their systems with a base amount of 128 megabytes of RAM. That borders on insolence, because any modern operating system, be it Windows or one of the many different  Linux flavourss, will need four times that amount to run decently. Rule of thumb: 256MB are a sensible minimum, 512MB are average, 1024MB are recommendable for anything that goes beyond standard office work. Upgrading your newly bought system with a 512MB RAM module will set you back about R400 to R500, depending on the brand. And already the so-called bargain doesn't look much like a bargain anymore...

While the peripherals in a PC are entirely up to your personal preferences and taste, they are often substandard in low-cost PCs. A DVD-ROM drive istead of a CD drive should be standard nowadays but isn't. More and more software is released on DVD instead of CD. Writers are not expensive, so you may want to have a CD or DVD writer in your PC for backup purposes. Also, mouse and keyboard sold with low-cost PCs are of absolutely low quality more often than not.

If you add all this together, you will easily arrive at an amount of R2500 to R3000for a decent office PC. Add in a decent screen, a printer, and other peripherals that are necessary, you can end up doubling that amount. While this may come of no surprise to people who know the IT field, they are not that target of these so-called specials. The target is you, the average customer with little knowledge but the need for decent hardware. You deserve to be educated properly and treated fairly.