Computing needs a bit of that Zara touch

On Tuesday my computer started making strange noises when it was turned on, and only half the time did the BIOS kick in properly. Yesterday it stopped working totally: the lights were on but no one was home. As I spent the whole of yesterday tramping around Wolverhampton and Birmingham I discovered that it is actually quite hard to find a half-decent desktop these days. Seemingly the way PC World makes itself look good is by DSG International (the parent company) putting worse computers in the affiliated Currys.Digital.

In the end, with lots of helpful advice from the Twitter community (i.e., 'Buy a Mac'), I got myself a Dell Studio 540:

It's a mid-range PC, nothing too fancy, but it should keep my web crawling going for a couple of years.

I was surprised to find, however, that Wi-Fi still isn't standard in desktops! Which meant I was forced to whip out a screwdriver and start taking my PC apart before I had even turned it on! This is just madness.

If the computer shops in this country want to survive the recession then they need to find a way of getting new stock in the shops quicker than ever. There is nothing enjoyable walking around a shop looking at stock which was released 12 months earlier; people more patient than myself will just buy a computer online. Whilst PC World seemingly have dozens of sales assistants (doing not a lot), for some reason they hadn't even got around putting the computer I bought on the shelves yet! It's the shops that fill their stores with things people want that will survive.