Zoostorm Pentium Dual Core E6300

Zoostorm is a name not many people think of when it comes to computers. Some may prefer to buy a major brand, but wait I just want a computer with windows on it, I don't want the other program's already pre installed & I want it cheap. This is where Zoostorm come in. The pricing structure is very competative, say with someone making their own PC, but compared to the mass produced clones made in China, this Liverpool assembled PC excels in the lower price bracket.

This computer was bought for £299 from Amazon. It comes with inbuilt graphics which I will talk about in a while. a 500gb HD & 5.1 Stereo sound, 2gb of Ram and windows 7 pre installed, nothing else. This is great for an upgrade but for a new PC add £150 or so for a monitor and external speakers.

First Impressions

I will say here I am going to point out some issues with the PC that seems to happen across the Zoostorm range. They have what can be described as build issues - there are problems with the wrong BIOS, faulty power supplies and hard drive issues. The problems on by first computer included windows not shutting down properly (computer 2 days old); Windows not starting (computer 3 days old); Hard Drive error, resulting in unable to boot (computer 5 days old). Some serious problems Zoostorm need to correct.

Back to the review of the replacement.

Keyboard - this is a Genius make, has a nifty logoff button on the keyboard, key pressure is fine.

Mouse - again a Genius Optical Mouse.

The PC itself, comes in a nice case with bue power on switch, this also acts to logoff to conserve power. On the front there are 2 usb sockets & a headphone/microphone sockets, there is also a 20x DVD writer.

At the back, we have all the normal sockets for VGA, serial, 4x usb ports and the connections for 5.1 audio.

Running the PC - if you have used Vista or XP you won't have time to make a cuppa, this machine gets going straight away. Windows 7 is a very good operating system and very quick.

The instruction manual is hardly worth the paper it is printed on (a 8 page A5 manual) that tells you how to instal a previous version of windows! & the rest of the manual is 6 pages of trouble shooting tips..... There is also a leaflet telling you how to do a system reinstal to factory settings and finally a leaflet telling you to remove Bullguard Internet Security from your PC before installing another AV product.... I still haven't found Bullguard!

The graphics - OMG, on board and pathetic, on the "Lemon PC", they hurt my eyes. On its replacement things were better, but not very good.

The replacement PC works fine (at the moment), runs very cool and has had none of the issues reported earlier.

What I would recommend is investing another £90 on a better power supply and a graphics card. The psu supplied is only 255 watts and that will not run anything more than what is in the case already. And it appears from my problems that the PSU was not stable and may have spiked the hard drive. Go for a 400w PSU & graphics card costing around £70.

To summarise, this is a Value PC at a value price, the build quality is dubious accross the range, so it is not just because it is a cheap PC. Where else can you get a PC running Windows 7 with a Intel Duel Core Processor, 5.1 Dolby2 and 2gb ram?