[ILUG] [Partially OT] - Aldi/Lidl Machine Advice

[Timothy Murphy]

On Wednesday 03 December 2008 10:24:10 John P. Looney wrote:

> > I have bought two computers from Lidl,
> > and I have not found them entirely satisfactory.
> >
> > I did find Lidl's after sales service very good, surprisingly.
>
>  Anything in particular you found bad ?

The machine that caused the most problems was an Athlon64 machine.
I wrote about this to ILUG before, and got into very hot water.
Basically, it works perfectly under Linux (Fedora-10)
but has huge problems booting into Windows XP.
The problem is something to do with graphics;
either the card or the cable.

I'm quite surprised, as the motherboard is Asus
and the video card is AMD/ATI,
both of which I would expect to be pretty good.

>  I was pretty stunned with their 3
> year waranttee, and the fact that they'll send someone out to your house to
> fix a machine without quibble.

I don't know about that.
I was rather impressed when I had a problem with the mouse on one machine,
probably due to misuse by my grand-daughter or her Polish au pair.
Anyway, I asked Targa (the Lidl computer maker) if they would sell me
another wireless mouse, and they responded by sending me free of charge
the whole input system - mouse, keyboard and wireless device.

>  One thing about the machines; they are featureful, and not very
> expandable. So yeah, you get a SCART port etc. but good luck putting a
> different video card in later.

I don't see why that would be a problem -
my two computers seem to have standard PCI cards in them;
I just put a WiFi card into the cheaper, 32-bit machine.