Beating the High Street

Today, for a laugh, I thought I'd teach my student the difference between High Street manufacturers and building your own PC. I think you'll agree, the difference is eye-opening.

Dell Dimension E521 £489 inc VAT (reduced from £549) component price

Processor - AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ £91.95
Mainboard - nForce4 chipset £34.00
Operating System - Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium (spit!) £71.66
Memory - 1024Mb DDR2 RAM £28.44
Harddrive - 160Gb SATA £34.32
Monitor - 20" Widescreen Flat Panel £124.99
Graphic Card - 256Mb PCI Express nVidia 7300 £26.87
Optical Drive - 16x DVD+/-RW Drive £16.80
Case - Typical Dell Black Mini Tower £17.98
Subtotal £459.01
Delivery (optional, but necessary for next day delivery) £12.00
Total £471.01

Now the interesting point is this... Dell, international PC manufacturer, are guaranteed to get the components cheaper then Joe Public, who are buying in a one off capacity. Dell, international PC manufacturer, also will have more faults and are renowned for not sorting them. And finally, Dell, international PC manufacturer, tell you you need Windows Vista. What happens if you want XP? What happens if a part of your PC breaks out of Warranty? You go to Dell to repair it, because Dell are the only company you can buy spares for your PC from.

And this you pay extra for.