Starnet Internet

I’ve always hated internet cafes, and Starnet Internet exemplifies everything I dislike about them: the service is diabolical, the look dingy and dirty, and everything is overpriced. Add to that that this particular internet café has infected 3 different friends’ computers with viruses, and you can see why my recommendation here is: stay well away.
Internet cafes seem to have popped up all over Brighton, and they are all really one of a kind: dirty, dingy and ludicrously expensive. I cannot understand a good reason to go: when an hour on one of these computers costs you over £1, surely getting an internet connection in your house will be much, much cheaper over time. What on earth is the point?
In Starnet’s case, the above price is compounded with a really poor service. The computers are from the early 90s, about as slow as it gets and riddled with viruses, worms and that sort of thing. I wasn’t exaggerating above: 3 different friends, on separate occasions and different computers, got 3 different viruses. If you do desperately need to go to an internet café, why go to the one where you’ll definitely pick something up that you don’t want to transfer onto your own device.
Starnet also offers various mobile phone gizmos (who buys those?) and extortionately priced scanning, printing and faxing: service I have never tried, and certainly never plan to. Scanning simply does not cost £1 per page, that’s just ludicrous.
I wish there was a lower star rating than 1 to give, as Starnet exemplifies everything you wouldn’t want in a business. This is the worst internet café I’ve ever been in, and possibly the worst business in Brighton. Cross the road to avoid.

This one offers GSM services, Internet, scanning, faxing and color copying. But with £1 per scanned page, I was reluctant to hand my pages over when I could get the same services done at a further Internet café for only 50 pence. But, since I was already here, I decided to hand my 6 pages over. They do sell many mobile accessories at affordable prices, and as far as Internet goes, it’s a lot less crowded than other places, and Internet surfing is a very quiet experience, with very little outside distraction.
One negative was after the clerk put the scanned JPEGs onto my USB drive. When I plugged the USB back into my laptop, AVG detected a Trojan on my USB which definitely wasn’t there before the pages were scanned, and now double-​clicking my USB drive on the My Computer screen of my laptop freezes my system. So, as a precautionary measure, if you do have anything scanned, let them send those scans to you via email and run a virus scan on them before opening, to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen to you.

This place is a handy little resource, situated half way up St James’ Street. It’s pretty dingy and the computers look very ‘90s, but it’s very useful if you’ve got work to do and your pc crashes on you, or if you’ve just moved to the area and haven’t got internet up and running yet. Prices are pretty standard — from 50p for half an hour. They provide other resources too like phone unlocking, repairs, printing, scanning, sim cards, faxing… It can look a bit dodgy though, with loads of different phone and pc accesories higglety-​pigglety under the counter, for pretty cheap prices. One thing to beware of too — scanning is a rip off at £1 per page! And if you don’t have a memory card they’ll make you pay an additional 50p to email elswhere, plus more for printing if you need that — it’s a bit of a bummer as I’ve found nowhere else nearby that does scanning.