Tesco stocks up with Siemens PCs

UK retail giant Tesco has announced plans to sell Siemens PCs in all 60 of its supermarkets. The company conducted trial sales in a limited number of stores three months ago.

The machines will go on sale at the end of this week, however the deal will be reviewed at the end of December.

Alan Norman, marketing director at Siemens Computer Systems, said: "It is an attractive bundle for the first time buyer or home user. We want to make it as easy to buy a PC as it is to buy a television." He added that many customers are intimidated by the big computer stores and by PC magazines.

The Tesco machine comes with a 300Mhz Celeron chip, 128KB of cache memory and a 56K modem and costs £699 including VAT.

The PC will have Windows 98 and pre-loaded software for Tesconet - the supermarket's Internet service provider software.

The deal includes one year's on-site warranty and telephone support. Siemens is currently training Tesco staff to offer customer advice and support in the stores.