I’ve just got off the phone to Argos customer services as I queried an issue that I’ve come across twice in the last couple of weeks.

In the first instance I’d reserved a camera from their website. It was selling at £80.90. However, when I went into store to collect (using my reservation number) they attempted to charge me about £130. I pointed out the discrepancy and they checked on a nearly computer (in preference to their till) – they confirmed my reservation price and charged my the £80.90.

This week I reserved a child’s slide for £24.99. In store they tried to charge me £29.99 until I pointed out the price difference. Again, they checked their PC and charged me the original reservation price.

I spoke to the manageress and she said that the issue was that the till only shows the current in-store price.

Today I spoke to customer services and they confirmed this was the case. The till doesn’t know I reserved it at a different price. It was recommended to me that I should always tell them in this situation if the price is different.

Really? Is it really up to me to tell them they’re attempting to over-charge me? Shouldn’t it be policy in-store for reservations to check the reserved price? Apparently, it’s not but they will look into it.

So, if you reserve an item at Argos, check the price you’re charged when you pick it up! I should also add that if the price goes down in store, it’s probably not worth mentioning it

Have you heard about the Dell Vostro 460? If not you are perfectly on the right moment on getting to know the Dell Vostro 460. This is created to cater the needs of small businesses for quality specification of income. It has a more powerful and faster Intel core processor.

The Dell Vostro 460 has a professional, smart and modern appearance. It has a 14x7x17.5in compact casing. It has a flat top area to let you put some stuff on it. The drive bay is covered by the door on the front panel. It has multi-card reader and compact flash. You can easily locate the power button under the dell logo. It has usb port, mic and audio under the sliding front door.

You can see 5 USB ports at the back of the machine and one of it doubles up to e-SATA connection. You can use it as DVD player with quality surround capability through its gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 audio out channel and SP/DIF. It has an optional blu ray drive for £50. It has i5 2500 processor that operates at 3.30GHz default frequency and has 6Mb of level 3 caches. It contains 4GB of 667 GHz memory as 2DIMMS for dual channel and upgradeability.

It will enable you to play light games with integrated cards in ATI Radeon HD 5450. You’ll find several options on the rear of the card with VGA, DVI and HDMI. It will enable you to insert a second disk inside the machine through its 16MB buffer. It has 500GB western digital wd5000AAKS-a7, 200rpm of storage.

You will be assured with its cooling capacity. It has three fans located at the cooling graphic card, CPU cooler extraction and at the rear of the machine. This gadget operates quietly and will not disturb you on your job. It has quality keyboards for comfortable use and standard optical mouse.

These are the modern feature of the Dell Vostro 460. This will guarantee the quality service to cater the needs of the small businesses.

One of the downsides of a PS3 is a lack of USB ports. Unless you have a charging dock for your controllers, each one requires a seperate port to charge on. On top of that you have to take into account any peripherals – the PlayStation Eye for instance. In my case I have the Eye, a controller dock (which requires just the one connector) and a Wheel. Ideally, I therefore need 3 USB ports.

One option is to add on a standard PC style USB hub. Another is to find one of a number of PS3 specific hubs which connect to the front of your PS3. I decided to choose the later and, after some investigation, settled on the Crown USB hub.

Like others, this clips on the front of a slim PS3. Unlike others it adds 4 more ports – this is a bigger count that other hubs. However, what they all have in common is the lack of power – they rely on the power provided by the existing 2 ports – so 4 extra ports is not necessarily a good thing! What was good, though, is that this one provides little windows for you to be able to still view the LEDs on the front of the PS3 – other USB devices cover these up. The Crown also has a plug for a power supply, if required.

The USB hub comes in a minimisitic box with only a small instruction leaflet included. This leaflet is next to useless however. It provides no details, for instance, on how the USB power has been distributed. For example, does each of the PS3′s ports provide 3 of the ports or does one provide all 4? And which one powers which? In the case of using up all the available power it would be useful to know how to distribute your connections.

The instructions also make mention of the power supply port – stating it is 5V and that you must use a specific one for it to work. Sadly they make no mention of where to get one of these or the full specifications (e.g. the wattage).

Unfortunately, the biggest problem was the product itself. It clips in nicely and blends in well. Sadly, I couldn’t get it to work. Whenever I switched on the PS3 the LEDs on my peripherals, rather than lighting up fully, would blink dimly. Not surprisingly, they weren’t being detected. Even with just one item plugged in it was the same.

Unplugging the Crown hub and plugging it back in again causes the USB devices to regain full power and to be operational again. However, switching off the PS3 seemed to reset it back to a non-functioning state again as the same problem would arise as soon as it was switched on again.

The instructions include no support details – so no website to contact, etc, for advise. Instead, I’ve had to send it back to Amazon for a refund.

If you do wish to try it out (it may work for you!) then it currently costs £7.50 from Amazon.

Summary of Crown USB Extension Hub (PS3)

Looks good and is well designed. But the instructions are lacking and, for me, I simply couldn’t get it to work – perhaps I just had a dodgy version, but I can’t recommend it

Reviewed by David Artiss on 16th May 2011.