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The Customer Thinks Their Eight Year Old PC is OK?

let's not be too hasty about it


In June 2011 there was a particularly naff commercial TV ad in which a firm of box-shifting computer vendors tried to sell PCs to customers who already had some.

In the Ad, the customer is introduced as someone who thinks their 8 year old PC is OK. Well, is it? I remember when Barclays Bank replaced their entire computer system with something flashy and new, but it didn't do them any good, because their old system was Unix, and they'd been fooled into replacing it with Microsoft. As a result, the staff complained that the computers were slower than they were before the "upgrade". This shows that Unix from 8 years ago is faster than Microsoft that's up-to-date.

Well, if you're silly enough to fall for all this Microsoft nonsense, you're free to visit The Microsoft Store and buy the latest PC operating system, but remember, I warned you about it in advance.

The fact is, if you have an old PC, say eight years old, and you put Linux on it, it'll be much more powerful than if you get a modern PC from various box-shifting places, as they seem to have a conspiracy to keep Microsoft in business. Anyway, you don't have to take my word for it. You can keep your old PC and buy a new one and then compare them. That is, a PC which you've installed Linux versus the latest expireware-infested Windows PC from a cheap-and-nasty box-shifting place. You can spot them because they include all sorts of win-hardware, and when you ask technical questions such as "May I please have my money back" they don't have the correct answers.

It seems like a desperate piece of propagandist advertising that goes beyond trying to get you to buy new furniture on credit rather than keeping your old furniture which is perfectly OK (Your Old 3-piece suite is OK). Maybe this is a last-ditch effort to sell off the white elephant computers they have in stock before the bottom falls out of the market?

There is another thing about the annoying ad in question. Because "the customer thinks their 8 year old PC is OK", the firm chooses to get into the customer's house and set up a shop indoors to surprise them when they come home. Well, if someone did that to you, you'd tell them to go away!

Update 2011/08: "8 Year old PC" has now become "4 Year old PC". This means implicitly that computers which the place in question is selling are likely to expire even sooner. It's an embarrassing admission by the dreadful box-shifting outlet that their products are even worse than they thought.


Another thing about old PCs is that they work OK on Jolicloud which allows interfacing of a variety of modern devices on a cloud platform.