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Great deal? Or Too good to be true? Read on. Here's the situation. You're reading the newspaper in the morning and enjoying your coffee or cereal, and you come across a great ad in the newspaper:
- Hewlett Packard
- Intel Pentium 4 2.6ghz
- 256MB DDR memory
- 80gb 5400rpm hard drive
- Intel Extreme Integrated Graphics
- 48x CD-ROM
- Floppy Drive
- 1 year Warranty & In-home support.
ONE DAY ONLY - SUPER SALE! QUANTITIES LIMITED! AVAILABLE WHILE SUPPLIES LAST! What do you do?
Well, that sounds SAFE. It's got EVERYTHING! Hewlett Packard, that's a name brand! - Everyone you know has owns an HP computer or printer. Intel Pentium 4 processor, that's the best cpu out there, isn't it? 256MB DDR memory, you might not even know what DDR means, but it sounds new and 256mb is certainly more than what your old machine carries. 80gb hard drive, that's also 3 or 4 times bigger than your current hard drive. 5400rpm, hmm, sounds fast, probably means it's faster than your old hard drive. Intel Extreme Graphics, wow, sounds fast! 1 year warranty -- oooOH!! It's got warranty, therefore I have nothing to worry about. If anything goes wrong, I can just take it back to the store or call for support.
Ok, so now you want to know the truth. To begin with their advisement is catering to average person that doesn't know all that much about computers. They hit you with trustworthy household recognizable brand-names like HP and Intel. Then they give you numbers that everyone measures their system by, in our case, it's Intel 2.6ghz. People nowadays only care about "how much ram", "how big is the hard drive", is it Intel? What people over-look is the quality of the components. Believe it or not, there are many different types of DDR Memory (RAM). Some manufacturers will give you lifetime warranty on their memory. Many will not. Let's talk about hard drives. Seagate hard drives have 5 year warranty. They are smooth, quiet, well-built and long-lasting hard drives. Western Digital and Maxtor only have 1 year warranty on their hard drives. The cheesy computer AD doesn't even state the brand of hard drive it carries. Guess why, it's probably a cheesy brand and refurbished hard drive. The numbers 5400rpm make people feel like they know everything about what they're about to buy. The ad-makers are banking on the fact that many people do not know what 5400rpm means. Well guess what it is means, it means 5400rpm means 5400 rounds per minute and the standard nowadays are 7200rpm and even 10000rpm. Lastly, the promised warranty! I have been a tech for many large and different companies for many years and I will promise you this. All major companies have terrible warranty support. The reason for this is because every company out-sources some function of their support to another company that will do it for cheaper and specializes only in that field. Most companies that are being outsourced the work will never care about you because they don't lose the client if they screw up, HP does. Not only that, but the sub-contracted companies don't get promotions or raises. Their job is to do the job as cheap as possible, and if that means putting off a customer until the last week, they will do so. Although not impossible, you are lucky to get timely warranty support. But I'm sure you already know all this.
So ultimately, what IS a good deal? I'll answer that tomorrow. In the meanwhile, thanks for reading and check out the site and other reviews. Thanks - J
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