The sub <£300 laptop challenge

A recent AccountingWeb article (covering a recent ComputingWhich? article) claims that laptop buyers in the market for a sub £300 laptop would be “best” served by a refurbished Compaq Presario.

I haven’t got the ComputingWhich? article, but the AccountingWeb article states that eBay wasn’t a good place to purchase since the laptops there in at least one case didn’t have proper software licences, and certainly (this is true) may not come with official retailer and manufacturer after-sales support or warranty.

ComputingWhich? Editor, Abigail Waraker comments that,
“It’s not easy to find a laptop for £300, especially one that you know will perform really well. So we were very impressed with the quality of the all of the models.”

“However, our bargain hunt shows that with a refurbished laptop you can get value for money, with the same levels of support as a new model – the perfect combination if you’re already thinking of Christmas presents.”

There is absolutely no way that ComputingWhich? are right, and it is dissapointing that the best they could suggest was a refurbished Compaq Presario with a broken power supply unit. Compaq/HP laptops are notoriously poor quality, containing cheaper and lower performance parts than their more suitable counterparts. Compaq/HP laptops are the trabant of the laptop world, favoured by PC World and similar high street shops. These laptops carry huge profit margins for the shops (and poor value for you) and have a reputation for poor build quality and terrible service (particularly PC World in this regard). If you want to know more, simply google these products and companies and make your own mind up from what you read.

Their researchers were briefed to find laptops with a minimum specification of a 233MHz Intel Pentium processor, 64MB of RAM and at least 1.5GB of storage capacity. They looked everywhere, direct with manufacturers, online resellers, classified and the high street.

But they didn’t look hard enough.

There are a multitude of brand new laptops available for around or less than £300, with at least a 1600Mhz processor, 512MB of RAM and 60GB of storage capacity. As a software house, we regularly have to source cheap hardware in order to test our software for compatability. Even so, a trade account isn’t required to get a good deal on a brand new laptop. It isn’t hard to find a laptop, from a quality manufacturer using quality parts with a specification that is at least 6 times faster and 6 times bigger than the ComputingWhich? minimum.

Second hand, even refurbished laptops, unless intended for children’s toys, testing or parts are not recommended. A cheap second hand laptop may have been misused (how many times have you moved a laptop while it is on, or not kept it on a flat surface?). It may have been kept in a dusty or smoky atmosphere (I’m looking at you, smokers!), increasing the likelyhood of critical temperature causing component failure. You’re also going to be getting a second hand laptop battery with your refurbished or used laptop, this is not good, particularly as cheap laptops are too often shipped with Celeron or Athlon/Semperon processors which all use up a lot of energy and emit a lot of heat. Used batteries on old technology won’t last long, maybe an hour or so on average. Old batteries might have NiCd cells, rather than NiMH or better still, Lithium Ion cells, compounding the issues associated with old, dated batteries. “Celeron” is the Intel brand name for the cheap, budget CPUs for desktops and laptops. Newer Celerons are significantly faster and cooler than the older Celerons, although the “Core 2 Duo” model is vastly superior and should be high on your wish list.

If you have £300 to spend, and you want a capable all-rounder laptop look no further. While sipping my cup of tea, I found several resellers eager to sell a £300 laptop. These deals are from reputable resellers (who are able to refund you, should you be sent a lemon, and from manufacturers with a good reputation for support and service):

Fujitsu Siemens AMILO Pro V3515
£284.99 inc VAT (£242.54 ex VAT)
Intel Celeron M 1.6Ghz, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD
DVDRW/DVD RAM
XP Home (Vista Ready)

Acer Aspire 3694 WLMi
£299.97 inc VAT (£255.29 ex VAT)
Intel Celeron M 1.86Ghz, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD
DVDRW/DVD-RAM
Vista Home Basic

Acer Aspire 5051AWXMi
£339.99 inc VAT (£289.35 ex VAT)
AMD Turion 64 2Ghz, 1024MB RAM, 120GB HDD
DVDRW/DVD RAM
Vista Home Basic

All of the above laptops can be had with Windows XP or Windows Vista. Some come with Microsoft Works (cut down office), or you can use the fantastic OpenOffice completely free.

The refurbished laptop from Currys that ComputingWhich? found had a broken PSU, replaced under warranty within three days. The fact that there is a wide choice brand new laptops available, with safe and factory electrically tested PSU’s should be a no-brainer.

All these laptops come with consumer protection courtesy of the distance selling regulations, are brand new with warranty and service/support options and are completely brand new. They all have brand new hard disk drives with no bad sectors, no damaged pixels on the screen, clean batteries with full power potential and none of the drawbacks of a used machine.

These laptops will probably arrive, in a brand new box on your doorstep within 2-3 days of ordering. You can also order with a credit card too for additional consumer protection

When you consider that Windows Vista is £150-£200 on its own, and the original parts for these laptops comes to £200-300 if you’re able to purchase the components individually, you can see what a great bargin these low-end laptops are. My advice would be, if you can stretch to £450 - you can buy some magnificant laptops, powered by the Intel “Core 2 Duo” processor. “Core 2 Duo” (NOT to be confused with “Core Duo”) laptops are in the £400-500 price range are the current sweet spot for bang-for-your-buck performance mobile computing. Even our two local Tesco stores are selling these laptops there now.

If you’re buying for Christmas, forget the refurbished laptops. Unless you’re purchasing high-end equipment that would normally be out of your price range, a refurbished £300 laptop is a poor choice.

Do you still want a refurbished Compaq Presario after reading this?

Comments please! Read the article that prompted this blog post on AccountingWeb here

HMRC eFiling, “a bit of a disaster” says BASDA Chairman

“A bit of a disaster” is how the new HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) Payroll eFiling programme was described, according to Dennis Keeling the outgoing BASDA Chairman, in a recent YouTube video. 

In the video, Dennis Keeling is interviewed by PayPerShop presenting a highly critical analysis of HMRC’s new amendments to Payroll eFiling.

Dennis Keeling, BASDA Chairman (speaking on Payroll eFiling at SoftWorld)

He comments on the new HMRC Payroll eFiling programme calling it, “a bit of a disaster” citing that now the “Government has run out of money” for implementing the Carter 1 recommendations (specifically for end of year filing) falls to the software vendors to ensure that their products are compliant with the Carter “Review of HMRC Online Services” report.

Dennis goes on to say that come next April, all supporting software will need to be rewritten in order to support the Carter 2 (mid year filing) recommendations as well as the older Carter 1 recommendations, since our Government wants to run at least parts of both at the same time.

This means that if you use software to produce your P45/P46 (and you have to file online by law by April 2008 if you have more than than 50 employees) substantial parts of it will need to be rewritten by April 1st 2008 in order to support the new recommendations, but still keep the existing system for filing the payroll year end returns.

But I bet your current payroll software package won’t be ready on April 1st…

“Learning from lessons of the past”
Earlier this year, HM Revenue & Customs introduced a whole new taxation scheme for the Construction Industry, called the Construction Industry Scheme. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll probably know all about the failings of this scheme by now. If you don’t - please select the “Construction (new CIS)” category and catch up

This scheme was introduced on April 6th with absolutely no live black box testing. In other words, a whole new taxation scheme went live - with supporting software infrastructure and software products from third party software houses - all without adequate testing. The first time monthly returns were tested with real data was the day when a real monthly return was submitted. Nobody knew what might happen if the Gateway servers were innundated with requests (they crashed, of course), or were sent real life data which caused them to congest. Of course nobody knew, because there was absolutely zero live testing. No beta testing. No testing, period.

This lead to a long period of confusion by customers, HMRC with their head in the sand and software developers working all hours to ensure that customers were well supported. Meanwhile, presumably as a way to appease the electorate, HMRC promise not to fine anyone whilst the new software system problems are worked out. It turns out that contractors could still lose their gross payment status if not compliant during this time (such as if a monthly return couldn’t be submitted online in time) - even if it wasn’t their fault.

In short, it was a costly disaster for the industry and the software developers. Presumably this cost was not incurred by HM Revenue & Customs, who refuse to provide adequate testing facilities for the software requirements that they impose. Dear reader, do you think that HMRC’s own basic software offerings are untested like this?

A quick word to HMRC: A simple solution to resolving this mess would be to offer a proper test service for payroll testing, in a copy of the live environment. This would allow all software developers to be confident when releasing software to customers that it has at least been tested before the 1st April.

“When you consider that some very large companies are now going to be forced to file P45/P46 electronically, you’d have expected that [they] would have tested their software before going live.”

“To leave it until the last minute just isn’t the way you should do it”
- Dennis Keeling, BASDA Chairman.

If nothing is done (and I suspect this is the case), come 1st April there may be vast problems which by their nature are unforeseen. Going by last April with new CIS, I would expect to see a good mix of technical failure in vendor software, misunderstandings by customers, HMRC software failings, Government Gateway collapse, and a confusing PR backpedalling by HMRC and who knows what else? Perhaps the air conditioning for the HMRC servers will break like they did this year and all the machines will switch off?

My advice to anyone using Payroll software would be to check their software support license or maintenance agreement. Your software vendor is most probably already acutely aware of the Carter review implications and from past experience will likely schedule a “patch”/”fix” or “update” to their software shortly after 1st April as support tickets start to flood in. Remember, this new eFiling mechanism won’t be tested and there are no plans by HMRC to allow software vendors to test in live either!

If you are not covered by a support or maintenance agreement, you might find that the software you use will not appear to function correctly for online filing from April 1st 2008. In which case, I advise getting the arrangements for software support in place, in time for April 1st. Also make sure you know how to apply any updates from your software vendor. It goes without saying that software from us - is automatically updated with little or no effort from the customer.

Make sure that your software license entitles you to updates and fixes next April.

I’ll give the last word to Dennis, “This could be one of the worst disasters we’ve had in a long time”. And I agree.