[thelist] Hardware Purchase Advice

[Johnson, Christopher (MTO)]

When it comes to hardware, my experience dictates about the same. I have
always bought my computers by picking and choicing my components and then
assembling the machine myself. I have had top name components fail on me and
I have had cheap components work reliably.

I once had someone tell me that about 60% of the computer components on the
market today were faulty in some way. I have no way of backing that up or
even validating that however, but the figure, although probably abit high,
is not altogether wrong.

If you buy parts from any of the big name manufactureres -- Abit, Asus,
Crucial, Kingston, Kingmax, Intel, AMD, MSI, ATI, Western Digital, Maxtor,
etc -- you at least hedge your bet that the parts that you are getting are
going to be reliable. At the very least, you get solid warranties in case a
component does die.

Aside: I bought a Maxtor hard drive (supposedly the current best
manufacturer) and within three months it crashed and dies on me. I took it
back to the dealer and had a new hard drive within two weeks. (Always
backup, even with top of the line components)

My advice would be to educate yourself first. Go the anandtech[1] or Tom's
Hardware[2] and do some research as to what is the best technology to buy
and who is considered the most reliable manufactureres. 

Probably the best thing is to find a reliable dealer. A dealer that will
stand behind the products that they sell with top of the line support. In
Canada, some dealers only support their products for two weeks after
purchase if they are not part of the a system that they themselves build.
Others will support the product for the entire time that the product is
under dealer warranty. By support I mean that if a hard drive fails, all you
need to do is to take the drive back to the dealer instead of shipping it
off to the manufacturer yourself.

In addition, there are some new technologies that are coming out this summer
that, if you want a high end computer, you may want to wait for. The biggest
of these is PCI Express. The other two are better adoption of SATA (serial
ata) and 64 bit computing (if you are into Linux at all) along with the new
graphics cards from ATI and NVidia.

Feel free to email me off list at 

chris at fuzzylizard.com

chris johnston