Another so-called PC manufacturer bites the dust !! They have traded on the fact that many people cannot put together a decent PC from the component bits and have no one to turn to for help and that PCs, then, were expensive things.

Now that PCs can be bought with the weekly bread and milk in Tesco, the bottom has fallen out of that market. Watch this space as more of them bite the dust !!

so beware : you might never see your stuff 1

Yes thats right Tanuki the whole company went under because you had a couple of emails 4 years ago....

Anyway on a more serious note, Still finally the saga draws to a close and its put out of its misery.

Back in the boom years around the turn of the century Evesham was a very good company to work for, as the belts tightened and the IT market changed the renumeration was no longer competitive and working conditions started to become changed for the worse.

It has to be said that the middle management level also ultimately contributed to the failings.

Fortunately I left them well before the end when it was obvious (to me at least) that despite the cross fingers and hope for the best attitude of management that there was no future there, the way the management of staff was going it wouldn't have surprised me if someone told me they were timing the amount time staff spent on toilet breaks, made worse by the fact that with long serving staff leaving this often inexperienced people to fill the gaps.

I wish the remaining staff should they take up contracts with the new company all the best, and the same to those who weren't offered re-employment.

Evesham was once a great place to work for, its a shame it didn't stay that way right until the end.

Gutting to see what must be the end of Evesham Micros/Tech. Have worked there for many years and now am looking for another job. State of the industry indeed, we could never compete against the multinationals and people would rather pay less than get good ol' UK service I guess. Loads of great memories to take away, we really were part of something special and it will be sorely missed.

Ishkandar, you are a chump. It amazes me how people bitch and whine when they get a couple of emails, but do nothing when letters drop through their door. Never would I wish redundancies on hundreds of people and their families because I had to press delete - show some compassion.

"The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt."

...according to the person on the live chat, on their website.

Hi All,

Evesham lives on, barely, but as a new company.

There were more redundancies on 4th, but the majority of the staff have been offered new, temporary 3 month contracts.

The remaining staff are very skilled, very good at their jobs, and should be able to carry the company onwards.

Technical support stills exists for Evesham's own customers, PCs are still being produced, sales are still taking place.

All that has happened is that the old company, which was replaced in august, has finally been disposed of.

There are still a lot of little computer shops run by one/two persons who will offer that kind of service for reasonable fees. They also give value-added services like advice and training. Eversham's business model is to slap bog standard bits together, stick on a fancy label and called it "manufacturing". There were no value-added services such as the local computer shops could give.

@Andy

When that business model went down the pan, Evesham, et al went the way of the dinosaurs !! Dell realised this not long ago and is trying very hard to move into the server markets with uncertain success. And where is Compaq these days ? And Evesham did not have even a tenth of their financial muscle.

So chump, I may be but I am a realistic chump. I'm not a woolly-minded jingoist !! As a previous commenter said, the problems began with the Evesham management and ended up in liquidation, whether you (or anyone else) wish it to or not !!

I suspect that their spamming emails may have had an effect. I have bought Evesham PCs and other stuff, and recommended them to others who have also been customers. Until I got the series of spam emails (on an address which was not one that they could possibly have known from my earlier purchases). From that point on I did no more business with them, and told other people the reasons. If they sent out millions of spam emails, maybe millions of us did the same. I suspect that had some part to play in their downfall. A pity that it takes so long.

Sorry. I am not the biggest fan of Eveshams Management and for sure, I dont like the way they treated their staff ... but to say they were spammers and good riddance ... is tosh!

I wasnt working there at the time of the SPAM Wall, however from my understanding, I believe it was a case of a mistaken approach. Something they were cained for .. and something they did not repeat. I very much doubt that any of the high and mighty here have not had any mistakes in their lives ??? He who is without sin.

The company lost its footing, for many reasons, from poor management, to the HCI being withdrawn at little or no nottce .. to the margins on PC's drying up. However they never ran short of clients. I am sure ex staff will back that up. People still lined up to buy product, it was just a case that the profit was not their.

The same things has happend to other uk buiders, who did not send out SPAM.

Evesham Facts.

1) They employed some of the best in the industry.

2) They produced some knock out products

3) They had a brand and reputation secound to non (distoryed August 07)

4) The had a poor management structure and never made the true leep from small/middle sized business into the larger corprate world. Everyone seems to agree the top managers messed up and stopped listening to those lower down.

It doesnt matter what Richard Austin and his mates do now ... the Evesham Days are gone. The brand and reputation is gone - I dont think the events of last August could have been handled any worse, if someone had set up to do so.

My advice to Austin ... go off into the sun with your money. As for the staff that are left .... I am sorry but the real Evesham died last August, let go and swim to shore. I like so many others left Evesham a long time ago .. and found bigger better brighter future elsewhere. Good luck

Mate, I cocked it up - you weren't the the one that made the comment about spammers, I got the wrong fella!

What you said is absolutely true, my apologies for the error.

@Sean

Actually, the REAL Evesham died when we moved to Vale Park.

> I believe it [sending spam] was a case of a mistaken approach. Something they were cained for

Yes indeed. I have never so much as contacted Evesham, let alone bought anything from them - yet was spammed regularly over a few months. Calling it a "mistaken approach" is somewhat generous, since it's obvious they'd simply got a copy of the spammers' favourite CD: "One Million Guaranteed E-mail Addresses!!".

>When I worked in Evesham, we could get £3000 for an Amstrad PC2386, and

>that had a respectable margin of profit. Now we see systems fetching £200-300 plus vat.

Well no. Not really. They aren't the same comparable systems.

Computers are cheaper, but not by such a large margin.

I did once spend nearly £2000 on a pc, but it was specced way OTT compared with the average 4mb ram and tiny HD of the day. It had one of the first 3d graphics cards, a scsi HD with 2 gb storage and so on. Today, I'd probably spend the equiv of £999 for a gaming PC. So, I'd say about 50% of the cost years ago, not 1/10th.

You can still sell PCs that cost thousands and many gamers and others that want / need the performance will pay that. But obviously not from spammers like Evesham.

e.g nvidia - that's a company that simply wouldn't exist if everyone was buying £199/299 computers, which generally have built-in graphics. They exist because enough want a gaming pc with an add in card and thus they will sell shedloads of cards like ti4200 / 7600gt and more recently 8800gt, and a few top end cards too for £400 or £500 a pop, that still have big margins.

If Evesham wanted the bigger margins they should have done what the niche players who appeal to the gamers and overclockers do to attract that market. If they wanted the low/mid range they similarly should have appealed to that market. At the time the voodoo 3 came out I did venture into Evesham and was at least more impressed at their PCs than the typical UK retailers, but nevertheless, I still bought parts and built two computers, one for me and one for my SO...and I've done the same ever since every few years + a couple of ram / HD / graphics card upgrades inbetween and never been near Evesham.

It seems instead that they bet the farm on some asinine government scheme to flog computers, supposedly tax free or something, for more than you could buy them for elsewhere. Well d'oh.

When you were flogging 386's for several grand, folk like myself, without 3 grand to spare, were buying 8086's for a few hundred quid from folk selling 2nd hand kit with low margins. I bought a ps2 model 30 for example. The company I worked for bought about 4 or 5 Compaqs with wordperfect for that kind of silly money for each Directors secretary [for real computing we were programming and using 32 bit vax/vms mini computers and had tons of £100 or so terminals - and, fairly unique for the time, everyone used dec's email]

Today, like most places, I suspect they've a pc on every desk and shedloads more PCs. Thus the market is just as big, if not bigger. They probably spend far, far more on IT. It's just that instead of DEC and Compaq selling 4 computers each for a few thousand [several few thousand in the case of DEC], someone sells them a few hundred or thousand PCs and each one has an OS / office / email and so on.

"sent my PC to Evesham for repair on 24th December which they have received and signed for, i still have not paid for it as was due to be paid 12 months later (Feb 2008), will i get it back repaired? Will i still have to pay?"

Differed payment means its gone out to finance company so Evesham has already been paid for your machine unless they formed their own finance which is unlikely. If the new company takes on full customer base with the warranty liability you might get you machine back repaired and then your liable to make the payments you signed for. If you don't then everything maybe "written off" even though there is a high chance the finance company may come looking for payments. If i was you if you don't hear something in a week from Evesham or so then contact the finance company and let them know you don't have the PC as effectively they own it. However everything seems up in the air to me having read this thread and it could be subject to full liquidation of all on site physical assets. Just make sure you have proof of return and keep any letters safe.

Although I do feel sorry for those who have had job losses, the end of Evesham is not a great loss. It has done a lot of people favours as the many that used to work there were never treated fairly and a lot of them have moved on to bigger and better things. Pay, perks and treatment were poor in many of the departments.

The end has been coming for a long time and everyone should have got out a long time ago - I don't know how anyone could not have seen it coming. I knew some people who had been there a lengthy period of time stayed on to hold out for redundancy pay from the government however.

The company knew what they were doing with the spam, as an ex-employee who got out in time I dreaded the amount of abuse we would got when we knew a spam email was about to be sent out. No one seemed to care how many people they upset. I will admit that although it was bound to cause bad PR I was surprised how bad it was.

I believe the company tried to get too big without having the right infrastructure. With better management the company could still be going strong today although perhaps it would not be quite the same as we know it. When markets change, businesses need to change to reflect that.

I'm amazed nobody has talked about them back in the 8-bit days, I remember seeing their ads for their Freeze Frame "backup" cartridges and other hardware utilities in the magazines of the day.

http://www.zzap64.co.uk/cgi-bin/displaypage.pl?issue=020&page=095&magazine=zzap

That's the Evesham Micros I remember!

I bought a custom server from Evesham in 1994 - the spec (for the time) was pretty high: 8GB SCSI disk, 32MB Ram, HP SCSI Tape Backup etc. ... Evesham left the disk uninitialised and I installed SCO Unix, MS-DOS and NT myself so that all 3 were bootable via separate partitions.

Evesham were knowledgable and helpful during pre-sales and after purchase. The server has been continuously running since 1994 - rock solid, not even a chkdisk error i nall that time, despite several power custs and frequent "in flight" messing with the O/S boundaries and boot partitions etc. (via partition magic).

I caught 2 thieves last year in the process of burgling my house ... walked in on them as they were dragging the server (by now on its side, but still powered on & running) across the study floor by the LAN cable. After "negotiating their exit", I put the old girl back in her rightful position under the desk, reconnected the monitor ... and yep, she was still plodding away like nothing had happened.

These days, it's mainly used by my nieces (aged 3 & 4) for surfing practice and general keyboard abuse, but I occasionally use it to administer my (physically adjacent) firewall/wireless router if it throws a wobbly and I can't connect from my other wireless PC's.

On the odd occasion I power it off these days (to give guests a quiet nights sleep, as the fan and disk are both pretty loud) the disk does "creak" a bit as it starts up again, but I reckon it's good for another couple of years yet. In all that time, the only performance mod I've made was to double the RAM.

Now, all Evesham were really doing was assembling other peoples bits into a grey box, but they did it pretty damned well IMO.

I used them thereafter to supply several basic PC's for use by my clients. These all proved just as reliable as my own. One in particular got lost by a courier company when I shipped it to my client after loading SCO Unix, configuring it and loading my application s/w. It turned up 3 months later. When I collected it the packaging was pretty mangled and I feared the worst. I tried to power it up, but it was unbootable. I opened the case, and found that all of the expansion cards had popped out of their backplane sockets (despite all still being screwed down at the brackets) - so the system had clearly been subjected to some pretty hefty impact during its travels. I bent the brackets back to their original angles, reseated the cards and booted again. Hey presto, up came the $ prompt without any errors! that system then ran for 5 years in a 24x7 application and never suffered an outage until the client eventually binned it.

So, Evesham are probably the only company to whom I could, with hand on heart, give such a glowing testamonial. All things considered, I for one regret the passing of one of the original "good guy" companies.

ps. and they never spammed me either :-)

Re: his comment about spammers..

You make me laugh! It must be really difficult to block the sender and delete unwanted emails...that must really put you out...people have lost their jobs and all you care about is your inbox. Irrelevant, inconsiderate & stupid comment mate.

Good luck to all who lost their jobs. Evesham Technology will be missed.

I owned (still own in fact) - several C64s and Amiga A500s, I bought a lot of 3rd party stuff off Evesham in the late 80s and early 90s - they were a great company in those days. A lot of people who used to buy PC stuff from them in the late 1990s and early naughties that things started to go down hill when they moved from Evesham.

I shall remember them fondly from the excellent company they were in the 80s and early 90s.

> Irrelevant, inconsiderate & stupid

Yes. Rather like the decision of some droid at Evesham who thought spamming total strangers was a good idea. Presumably you'd enjoy someone shouting "Buy our pizzas!" through your letterbox?

BTW: complaining about a company issuing spam has nothing whatever to do with its previously good record and obviously good customer support, or the sad plight of its employees.

Spamming. No, I don't enjoy it but then I don't get my knickers in a twist over it either. Nor would I be happy for it to go out of business which Tanuki seemed rather pleased about...besides those 'Buy our pizzas' leaflets come in quite handy on a Saturday night don't they?

All the evesham websites and mail servers appear to be down as of about 3pm today.

A disgruntled employee perhaps or something else ????

Cynical indeed, but it looks like it was true - the website is back up and running.

@Anonymous Coward re HMRC - I guess from your comment that you don't appreciate that the money that HMRC collects is actually OUR money - as taxes get used to provide public services for everyone? That's why HMRC is the preferred creditor - we, the citizens of the country, take precedence over companies, the finances of which only benefit the shareholders of that company.

Anonymous Coward, haven't you got anything better to do? let it go, you left 3 years ago. Also if your still so interested why don't you tell us who you are?