How to buy a computer at CompUSA or Best Buy without getting TOTALLY ripped off.

or, why a Dangerous Sandwich Computer may not be your best option.

  After all that, it doesn't seem like such a good deal to me.  CompUSA may have deals that good, and they will usually sell you a computer pre-built with a bit more memory than the internet companies, and real Windows ME (or XP) and some kind of warranty.

  With that in mind, perhaps some recommendations would be helpful so can go into the store and confront the salespeople armed with the squirt gun of knowledge:

1. Go with an AMD Duron processor. (stay away from Intel Celerons)  AMD has been doing very well recently in the performance arena.  The Duron (AMD's value line) performs nearly as well as a full on Athlon, and costs less.  Above all, stay far away from the Pentium4.  It performs poorly, and is very very expensive, and it's almost impossible to upgrade.  Benchmark after benchmark have shown that an AMD Athlon at any clock speed will out-perform faster clocked Intel Pentium4 processors.  Only recently with the 2.0GHz P4 could they outperform AMD's fastest chip, a 1.4GHz part.
    

2. Anything above 700MHz should be plenty fast for anything most of us need to do.  Any ambitious salesperson will try to sell you on higher MegaHertz, but that really only matters if you are going to be playing serious 3D games or doing huge video compressions or something like that.  No, a faster processor doesn't "make the internet come alive" for you.  My old K6-2 200MHz computer looked at the internet just as well as this Very Dangerous Sandwich computer I am using now.  Intel's "NetBurst Architecture" is a huge marketing ploy.  Also, remember that cheap systems come with cheap video cards, and no amount of processor power is going to make a cheap video card look good in advanced 3D games.
    

3. Get at least 128Megs of memory.  PC133 memory is just as cheap as PC100 anymore.  Getting 256Megs of memory is not a bad idea, especially if you can find it cheap.
    

4. Anything over 40Gigs of hard drive space will probably last you a LONG time unless you are a media junkie like me.  Don't worry about "faster" hard drives (like ATA100), they are just numbers to try to get more money from you.  Even 7200RPM hard drives are barely faster than the older 5400RPM ones.  That being said, you will notice a considerable improvement if you upgrade from your old 2.5Gig ATA33 drive.
    

5. If you see a no-name pc with the same features as a Compaq or Hewlett Packard name brand computer, go with the cheaper one.  They use almost the same hardware inside, the name brand computers just use expensive, pretty boxes.  In addition, the big PC makers (Gateway is notorious for this) have been known to have special motherboards made that almost guarantee that you won't be able to upgrade your system in the future.
    

6. If you don't want to watch DVDs on your little computer monitor, you don't need a DVD-Rom drive. they may try to tell you that some software will be coming out on DVD only, but that won't happen for a good while.

7. CDRW drives are really really nice.  If you are looking at one faster than 12x recording speed, don't get it unless it has "burnproof" technology. Without that, you will be making many junk cd's; "coasters."  8x recording seems fast enough - a full length CD in 10 minutes.

  Remember this: the salesperson wants to get more money from you.  If you want a cheap computer, that is capable of running modern software and surfing the internet, don't buy all the frills like a faster processor or a DVD drive.  Just get what you need.
 

  As a CYBERJOCK, i wish everyone would feel the same way about computers that i do.  I see a great deal of value in my computer.  It's a learning tool.  It's an outlet for my creativity.  It's an entertainment device.  It's a communication tool more versatile than anything before it.  However, i realize that few people will be as enthusiastic about the latest new microchip technology that enables a game to have real-time volumetric shadows from up to 16 light sources as i am.  Or how about "antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media" that will let us have 400Gigabyte hard drives in a year or so.  Nope, nobody cares.  MPEG-4 video encoding that will let a DVD sized movie be squeezed to one eighth it's original size?  Wait... did I see an interested... no.  Didn't think so.

Oh well.

1. wow, is she cute or what?

A. Cute.

B. What.

2. wow, are they cute or what?

A. Cute

B. What

3. Tony is more psycho than the cow.

A. True

B. False

1. A
2. B
3. C

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