watford.co.uk

There are probably 1000s of us out there who need to buy a pc, but who know next to nothing about them, and are therefore cannon fodder for the rip off merchants out there.

Asking for advice from friendly geeks often throws up more questions than answers; you find out that PC World are the work of the devil, that you should never buy a PC with Windows installed on it, that Pentium Processors don't work, Celeron are even worse, and the best bet is to mine your own silicon and work from there.

Fortunately I come from a family of geeks, so I was able to get some real in depth advice on exactly what I needed when recently purchasing a new PC - what memory I needed, hard disk space, CD ROM drives and so on. Which makes the Watford Electronics website a good option.

Watford Electronics are a store specialising in all things computer related, from your 50 pence flange up to space station control centre. The part that I found useful though was their option to buy a computer tailor made to your own specification. I was originally going to buy an off the shelf Dell PC, when it was pointed out to me that, via the Watford website, I could configure my own pc to a similar specification to the Dell model, leave out bits that I didn't need and make a good saving.

All of this works perfectly if you know what you need - so if either you know, or someone can advise you, on the difference between 128K RAM and 512K RAM, or a 52 speed DVD ROM drive and a 26 speed CD ROM drive, then I would guess you could save up to 25% by going through the Watford site rather than purchasing a ready made Dell model for example.

If you don't have time to work this stuff out though then this may not be the best site for you.