The Lion didn't sleep that night! (jungle.com)

Member Name: Indiegirl

Product:	jungle.com
Date:	14/01/03 (300 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Delivery speed was second to none, Wide choice of products, Excellent value for money

Disadvantages: Navigation through the website isn't the easiest by far

I know there's a squillion reviews on Jungle.com, but given my recent experience with them I felt I had to add my comments to the mass.

I wanted to upgrade my friend's PC to include a CDRW drive. There's a tonne of these on the market nowadays, and I did some thorough research before starting a bargain hunt.

One thing about me - I hate paying over-the-odds for goods, so the price of the item was imperative.

I actually browsed onto Jungle as an afterthought - normally I would use Novatech or other peripheral websites, and it was a flippant click of the mouse that saw me arrive at Jungle.com.

I'm very glad I did..

There's a few niggly things I didn't like - the search bar is tiny and squashed into the top left hand corner, and you really have to know what the title of the item is that you're searching for. Jungle doesn't use fuzzy searches, and searching for CDRW (which I would've hoped covered both drives and media) only gave me discs. Not much cop.

At this point I was thinking "is it worth it?" and then decided to go through the sections listed under the search bar. Clicking Computer Hardware / CD and DVD Drives / CD Rewriters gave me a list of what I was after. Bingo!

A long scroll through the lists - there's no option to sort them by price for the stingy likes of me - gave me what I was after. £29.99 for a FREECOM 16x40x10 CD drive. For the non-techy of you that's a 16 speed write (ie writes out a CD up to 16x faster than the standard normal read speed - so a 74min audio CD would take on average 4.5 mins to write), 40 speed read and 10 speed re-write.

£29.99 though, I don't care if this was a brand I'd never heard of (further investigation around the Jungle site showed that Freecom were widely stocked by Jungle), that was a bargain price!

One aspect I did like was the review section - this allowed me to judge from others
9; past experiences how good (or bad!) this CDRW drive was. On the whole, a multitude of positive reviews led me to decide to purchase the item.

So - the item was thus added to my 'basket' and I opted to checkout there and then.

I had to create an 'account' with Jungle as I was a first-time buyer, which was on the whole straightforward, and took a few extra minutes.. but my details (address) are stored on the system and I don't have to faff around typing them in every time. Hurrah!

I proceeded to checkout, and this is where the surprise was. Delivery is categorised according to the price of the item, not the weight (which really could prove a little unfair if you buy - for example - a DVD Rewriter which has no difference in weight to a CDRW like I bought). However, my item was in the lowest category so delivery was a mere £2.99.

Then I spotted the gem which I will forever be grateful to Jungle for - Evening Delivery for £2 more. At last!! As someone who lives on her own and who leaves the house at 07:30 in the morning - often not returning until 17:00 or later, this was perfect. Evening delivery is after 5pm, so I opted for that.

That was it - a few clicks, popping my credit card details on (it's a 128-SSL secured server which means that your card details are super-encrypted and super-safe) and my order was placed at 15:00 on a Thursday afternoon.

Friday evening, 17:10, my doorbell rang... and lo and behold - my item was with me. It's now backing up my friend's work and hard drive with no troubles at all.

So all in all whilst it was a little difficult to find what I wanted - you have to be prepared to sift through everything - you *can* get a bargain, and I did! Evening delivery gained huge Brownie points and I'm pleased to say that my experience with Jungle was, on the whole - a totally positive one. I thoroughly recommend! :-)

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