Redten broadband with free PC review

Please note that this offer has been frozen. Please see: Redten puts freeze on 'free PC' offer

Redten Internet is a new name to many, but behind it stands Watford Electronics Savastore. When Redten announced its ground-breaking internet package in November last year - sign up for 8MB ADSL broadband at £19.99 per month and get a free PC worth £500- many potential subscribers who were unaware of the Watford connection were suspicious of the deal and thought that the free computers would never materialise.

Well they have, in the form of neat black-and-silver system units, with matching 19in TFT monitors from LG. The screen is an unexpected treat on a system costing a notional £500 and very nice it is too - except for the fact that the controls are on the back, which makes it fiddly to adjust the image.

Inside the system unit are a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor and a 160GB hard disk, making this very much an entry-level PC, but a score of 87% in our 2D benchmarks proves that it's no slouch. The 512MB of DDR2 system memory is, however, barely sufficient when up to 128MB of it can be claimed by the onboard graphics, and an upgrade will be required to make the most of Windows Vista. Early Redten PCs were pre-installed with Windows XP Media Center Edition and supplied with a free upgrade voucher for Vista, but Redten will start pre-installing Vista as soon as it becomes available.

Get connected

The build quality of the system unit is good, but Redten has made the unwise decision, presumably on the grounds of knocking a fiver off the manufacturing cost, of supplying a standard IDE disk drive instead of a SATA one. This is despite the fact that there are four SATA connectors and only one IDE connector serving both the DVD writer and the hard drive. This arrangement means that it's impossible to install IDE drives salvaged from an existing PC.

The mouse and lightweight keyboard are supplied by LG and come from the budget parts bin, but compared to the ugly, inadequate and tinny-sounding speakers, they're models of functional elegance.

Anybody starting from scratch will need to spend around £70 to double the memory to 1GB and buy a proper speaker system, and a further £20 if they wish to switch to wireless peripherals. This makes Redten's notional £500 PC worth around £410, but as it's given away free, it seems rather churlish of us to complain.

The total cost of the PC, plus broadband package over the three-year minimum contract period is £769.63. This is made up of a £49.99 connection charge and 36 monthly payments of £19.99, which are structured as an interest-free personal loan. The true cost per month after factoring in the connection charge is £21.37, so it's easy to compare this with other broadband suppliers and make your own decision as to whether the 'free' PC is worth the three-year tie-in.

Getting online

Redten's broadband service is supplied by BT Wholesale and offers speeds up to 8Mbit/s. Realistically, you can expect between 1Mbit/s and 6Mbit/s depending on your distance from the exchange and local line conditions. We've been connected for six weeks and have suffered only a single brief service interruption.

Web space and webmail facilities are provided, but two months after Redten's launch, the webmail service was still not fully operational. Until it is, you'll need Outlook Express or a similar program. Although Redten's support services have been in place since day one, the standard of help dispensed over the 9p per minute support lines depends very much on who answers your call, and sent emails to Redten's technical support department appear to disappear into a black hole.