HARD DRIVE PRICES SKY ROCKET DUE TO THAILAND FLOODS

The hard drive mar­ket is react­ing to the heavy floods in Thailand.

Prices for hard dri­ves have jumped by as much as 50 per­cent within one week, mar­ket research firm IHS said. About a quar­ter of all hard dri­ves are man­u­fac­tured in Thai­land and it appears that all major ven­dors are affected in some way.

West­ern Dig­i­tal pre­vi­ously said that it may see a rev­enue decline of about 60 per­cent in the cur­rent quar­ter and told Ger­man pub­li­ca­tion Golem.de that it will be able to pro­duce only 22 to 26 mil­lion dri­ves this quar­ter, instead of the planned 58 mil­lion units. A spokesper­son said that WD “cur­rently waits for the fac­to­ries to dry” to be able to restart its man­u­fac­tur­ing tools. What makes mat­ters worse are the usu­ally thin profit mar­gins in the HDD indus­try, which means that man­u­fac­tur­ers typ­i­cally have only five to seven days of mate­r­ial supply.

A Sea­gate man­ager told CRN India that the com­pany expects and “acute” short­age of dri­ves and that the man­u­fac­turer expects prices to increase. How­ever, there was no infor­ma­tion how sharp this increase can be. Both WD and Sea­gate said that the floods in Thai­land have cre­ated a prob­lem for the indus­try that will take sev­eral quar­ters to resolve.

Thank you to TomsHard­ware & Golum.de for this information!

HP to discontinue PC Manufacturing

Hewlett-Packard has con­firmed that the com­pany will stop man­u­fac­tur­ing PC’s, Tablets and Mobile phones.
It has also agreed to buy UK soft­ware firm Auton­omy for £7.1bn ($11.7bn).
HP added that it was con­sid­er­ing sell­ing its per­sonal sys­tems group, which includes the world’s biggest PC-making busi­ness, and that it will dis­con­tinue its webOS devices.

HP is recog­nis­ing what the world has recog­nised, which is hard­ware in terms of con­sumers is not a huge growth busi­ness anymore.

UPDATE: Wolverhampton Riots

As many may know, Riots hit the town of Wolver­hamp­ton. Yobs gath­ered up around Queen Square in the City Cen­ter, and dam­age quite a bit of prop­erty.
Local shops were asked to close under police rec­om­men­da­tions, and many shops were boarded up.

We had a walk through the City Cen­ter and cap­tured West Mid­lands Police doing a bril­liant job — LINK: http://goo.gl/cBloY

We offer CCTV Instal­la­tions to help catch yobs in the act.
For more infor­ma­tion on our CCTV Ser­vices, please visit: http://www.cxitsupport.co.uk or call us on 01902 713137 for more information.

As we had to close early on Tues­day and Wednes­day, we apol­o­gize for any inconvenience caused.

Trade repair official

Con­cep­tex Com­puter & Lap­top Repair Cen­tre now offers repairs to the trade!

That’s right. Now the IT trade can send lap­tops and com­put­ers to us for their repairs. This includes any type of repair, whether it be for com­puter retail­ers who don’t repair or computer/laptop repair­ers who don’t do advanced board repair.

We cover:

DC Sock­ets
DC Jacks
Screens
Charg­ing Cir­cuits
Faulty Graph­ics Chips
(nVidia prob­lems, HP DV series lap­tops)
Bro­ken USB Ports
Pass­words
BIOS Pass­words
CMOS Pass­words
(Yep, even the Toshiba’s, IBM’s, Dell’s and Sony’s)

We also offer a repair man­age­ment & sta­tus sys­tem which allows our trade cus­tomers to log into a spe­cial web­site and track the sta­tus of their repairs with us, LIVE!

Be sure to con­tact us if you’re inter­ested. Ask for Lee or Shaun.

Great news for our business customers 10% off in store

As you’d expect, our busi­ness cus­tomers get busi­ness rates.

Well, our busi­ness rates have recently proven very suc­cess­ful as we’ve had very pos­i­tive feed­back from our busi­ness client.

So we’ve been think­ing — how can we reward you for this?

We’ve had a think and finally came up with an idea…

We’re now offer­ing our busi­ness rates to all the staff of our busi­ness customers.

That’s right, all the staff of new or exist­ing busi­ness cus­tomers can ben­e­fit from their employer’s busi­ness dis­count with us! That’s 10% off all prices once you con­firm your employer to us either in store, online or over the phone!

We sug­gest you get the mes­sage out to your friends, fam­ily and col­legues! Espe­cially with Christ­mas com­ing up!

What’s to lose? With already great prices and a fur­ther 10% dis­count, you may as well get in touch with us — you never know what you might save!

Free IT Review

Could your busi­ness ben­e­fit from our free, no oblig­a­tion IT review, or you would sim­ply like to put your mind at rest and ensure that every­thing is run­ning well?

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