You get what you pay for?

An old computer guru once told me you get what you pay for in computers.

So, if the specs are the same, whats the difference between laptops bought
at Best Buy and those sold directly from the mfg, which typically are
prices several hundred dollars more?

Or IOW, is retal stuff junk?

 

In chocolatemm typed on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:15:03 +0000 (UTC):

That old guru was partly right. As they usually discount older models a
lot to move them out (this could be a good thing). And you can often get
a pretty good deal. The trick is knowing what you are buying. But if you
don't, here is some things to look for.

1) Do a Internet search on the model you are looking at. It could be a
lemon model that the manufacture sells to the stores at a discount and
offers no warrantee. Although the store might have there own one. Which
usually isn't a very good service more times than not.

2) Might be refurbished, so check carefully. And refurbished generally
only has a 90 day warrantee. For me this is a good deal since it is
cheaper since it is refurbished and comes with little to no warrantee
(which saves more money off in the price of the product). The reason why
I don't care is because I am an electronic engineer and I do my own
service work since I am far better than most computer techs anyway. And
I work on mine either in or out of warrantee anyway

And watch out for online stores like TigerDirect. While you can get some
really nice deals at those places, they also sell lots of junk as well.
For example I bought four HP desktops there about 9 years ago. And the
inside didn't match the model number on the outside. Nor did the
recovery disc match anything, the model number on the outside, nor what
was in the inside. And while I was really pleased with HP before this,
these were pieces of junk. You were lucky to run any OS without locking
up sometime during the day. And they ran much slower than the specs
suggested. And I found out later that neither HP or TigerDirect would
honor any warrantees. So I stripped to for parts since they all needed
new motherboards. And it was a terrible deal in the end.

Later Dell and TigerDirect went to court for about the same sort of
thing I got bit by. As they were selling Dells for really great prices,
but Dell sold them to TigerDirect without any warrantees. Yet
TigerDirect advertised them with Dell warrantees. And lots of customers
were very upset to learn there was no warrantee at all. Dell was good
about it later and honored the warrantees (unlike HP) and then sued
TigerDirect.

 

I didn't know that. It's really weird that they didn't mention this as an
option when I called on the tech support line, don't you think? They almost
tried to dissuade me from taking my laptop into the store.