Good build quality, excellent customer support - Can be customised
Disadvantages:
Not enough memory as specified
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
These Systemax machines are well-built, and have plenty of space inside for future upgrades. The cables inside are very neatly tied away, which makes life a lot easier when you want to install a new video card or extra RAM. USB ports are provided front and rear, which is essential now that USB memory sticks are becoming popular.
However, I'd strongly suggest that prospective customers get more RAM fitted than the standard spec. With the standard 256MB the computer struggles a little with large documents, and you definately don't get the best out of the powerful AMD Athlon XP processor.
Fortunately, Simply allow you to customise these machines and will happily fit almost any extra gizmos you want, or remove anything you don't think you need.
I customised my machine to 1GB of RAM and added a DVD-writer to the standard equipment, and the price for these improvements was very reasonable.
However, I did experience some trouble about 2 months into ownership - the hard disk crashed, making the computer unusable. This is something that all computers risk, and fortunately I'd made backups to protect my work from such problems.
When I rang the Technical Support line, the guy was very helpful and offered to send me a replacement drive. I accepted, and received the drive the next morning. Fitting the drive was very easy due to the spacious design of the case and the excellent manual - finally a company that gives you a paper copy, rather than just PDFs!
When I had problems installing a driver for the video card, tech support was happy to post me out a replacement set of drivers, and even offered to talk me through the installation.
The computer is now happy to run for weeks on end without rebooting - even my old HP can't manage that!
In short: Good build quality, nice case, and excellent technical support.
More details
Reliability
Good
Memory / capacity
Poor
Range of Extra Features
Satisfactory
Instruction manual
Very useful
Evaluate this review
How helpful would this review be to someone making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
This product has not yet been reviewed. 
