dad PC

I've made a bit of a potential minor catastrophic blunder.

Well, actually I've made a series of relatively small blunder that have combined and could give me some fairly serious problems.

I should start at the beginning.

My dad currently uses my sister's old desktop PC.  It's very old - I built it for her more than a decade ago, and it was only mid-spec when it was built.  It's therefore getting quite creaky - particularly as my dad is a bit of a one for installing random bits of software and doesn't know how to optimise the system.

So, for example, his penchant for saying yes to installs he doesn't actually want/need/know what they are means he has to have the virus checker doing constant scan and that of course uses up a good chunk of the available resources (virus software seems to be quite prone to becoming bloat-ware under the assumption that everyone is running the latest-spec equipment), slowing it down further.

He's also been getting into digital photography and so wants a system that could handle processing and manipulating big digital photographs.  He therefore asked me a while back about getting a new machine and I recommended either buying one from PC world (or similar) if he wanted a cheap route to upgrade or me building one if he had a bit more cash as I could build one with specs that would help him, rather than lots of rubbish he didn't need that you get if you spend a lot of money in such places.

He agreed and went with a budget of £1,000.  I then put together some suggestions and we refined it and it came in at about the right budget.  It was a bit of a beast of a system in terms of processor, ram and hard-drive, but nothing special for the graphics, case and other bits (he's already using a bigger monitor, so he's keeping that, and we're also re-using his DVD burner - both are recent additions to the old machine so aren't that old, but also he doesn't need anything more).

Anyway, that was all fine and good, but I had a bit of an issue with timing, but also with finances, so he transferred the money, but I didn't have the time to buy stuff, plus some of it wasn't in stock at the time.  However, I did something particularly dumb with the money too.

I prefer to use credit cards online for the additional protection they give, but instead of putting all the money onto one card and therefore freeing up an appropriate slot, I spread it across multiple cards.  Why the hell I did this looking back I don't know - it means multiple orders and therefore multiple postage, so will cost me more.

Also, rather annoyingly, I've now come to buy the bits and the price of every single bit has gone up slightly.  Not a lot - a few pounds, or tens of pounds- but enough to give me some additional issues.

It also doesn't help that I didn't really think sensibly about my car tax and insurance: I should have done 6 months instead of 12 for the car tax and split the insurance into monthly payments - both would have cost more in the long term, but wouldn't have taken big chunks out of my cash reserves.  The stag do also cost a lot more money than I thought it would - I haven't added it up, but it was at least £500, all of which had to be paid in cash as it was all paid for by the best man and then re-paid by us: I couldn't book anything individually, which I could have put on a card and therefore given myself some free-space for my Dad's PC.

The upshot of all this is that I now have an annoying situation where I am going to have to pay more for my Dad's PC than he has paid me, but I can't go back to him with the above problems because he's under the impression I've already bought it all.  What I might do is make a substitution - there are one or two bits that I picked as slightly better than he needs (the GFX card in particular) in order to make the budget up so I may go cheaper so it cancels out the additional cost.  Not 100% honest, but he will never play a game on it so he doesn't need anything with any grunt.