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#11
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The sale of ****ty computers is a multiple-faceted problem, and to
blame Gateway alone is inaccurate. The buyers are, generally, stupid in several respects-they buy on purchase price alone, don't understand the tradeoffs involved, and refuse to use good sense in specifying, installing, and maintaining their hardware. On the other hand the vendors respond to these problems with their own agenda in mind: they cut costs to the absolute minimum, ignore all previous standards as far as possible (and refuse to document the rest), and pander to customer ignorance at every turn, all to maximize their profits in the only quarter that counts: this one. Consider well-built products, and why they are well built. They always have certain things in common: relatively high (but not extreme) build cost, solid conservative engineering, a general refusal to pander to fashion but usually a certain style of their own, rarely being ugly. Most importantly, they are designed at arm's length from marketing and sales and have user bases consisting of above-average people. |
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#13
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On Sat, 28 May 2005 21:34:44 GMT, ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net
(Ben Myers) wrote: That's what I've seen in the last year or so of fixing or refurbing these beasts... Ben Myers I don't see how you keep from pulling your hair out Ben. BTW, I assume you offer quality built, locally supported White Boxes to your community. Got a business web site for us to see your work? Regards, |
#14
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I still have 90% of my hair even though I can't persuade people from buying the
cheap junk sold in stores and elsewhere. I build no more than a half dozen white boxes a year. The money is to be made cleaning up messes made by other people, either the manufacturers or the computer owners themselves with poor decisions. Small networks are not as plug-and-play as everyone pretends they are. Wifi has its tricky elements. People need Cat 5 runs between office cubes and patch panels. Hard drives crash, and I replace them even under warranty, because clients quickly learn to value their data. Adware, spyware and other varmints regularly inhabit computers. Stores and name brand mfrs (e.g. Dell) regularly sell low-ball computer setups. This past week, I sold and installed 5 memory upgrades to P4 XP systems which had been delivered with only 256MB. My clients considered me a miracle worker for figuring out how to speed up their systems so much. I can get white boxes assembled from my local distributor for $25 over the price of the individual parts, but everyone in my area is so enamored by Dell or the latest sale at Circuit City, that the selling cycle is not worth the time to sell a white box. My cardiologist has eMachines garbage running his office, less reliable than my ticker and circulatory system. Go figure. I go with the flow... Ben Myers On Sat, 28 May 2005 22:53:29 -0400, Shooter fhasfdjh@AlkjdaF@com wrote: On Sat, 28 May 2005 21:34:44 GMT, ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote: That's what I've seen in the last year or so of fixing or refurbing these beasts... Ben Myers I don't see how you keep from pulling your hair out Ben. BTW, I assume you offer quality built, locally supported White Boxes to your community. Got a business web site for us to see your work? Regards, |
#15
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"Shooter" fhasfdjh@AlkjdaF@com wrote in message ... On 28 May 2005 16:38:57 -0700, wrote: Consider well-built products, and why they are well built. They always have certain things in common: relatively high (but not extreme) build cost True but not really that bad when you actually see what your are getting. My last White Box cost me around $150 more than what GW showed as being somewhere close in hardware (brand names not included). GW wanted $1200 with a lot of the components being a mystery when it came to manufacturer. My White Box was $1350 and all the components were brand names of my choice (even if they were probably built in Asia or Mexico). So for an additional $150, I got a box built MY WAY and with the brand components I chose and just to throw a hard throbbing bone to Ted, I get local support from the actual guy that built the damned thing in the first place who's reputation is riding on every box he puts out there and who actually CARES about my happiness with the box. Stuff you would never see GW or those other fake companies employ in their swiftly failing business model. snip I think you've made an important point here. The way that the big guys hold down cost is to cap the price they are willing to pay for a given component. The manufacturers of the cheapest part gets the contract to make thousands of these pieces of **** that end up in the homes of unsuspecting users. Even if a user is have aware of the quality issues, many of the crap components come from the same companies that make good quality ones. The difference is in the price of the parts they can use and still make a profit. This is also why you often see such polarization of opinion as to the quality of one companies products as viewed by different users and techs. Where a white box builder will swear by one companies component and then some corporate repair tech tells you they make cheap shoddy components. The difference is the white box guy isn't buying their cheapest model, but the repairs tech is seeing the cheapest models from the same manufacturer stuffed into some name brands low end model with the expected results. One of the biggest screw ups I ever saw was a series of 33.6/56K winmodems the specifically stated they were not to be installed in Celeron systems that showed up in a number of name brand systems sporting Celeron CPUs. The same company offered a full chipped version of the same modem and recommended it's use in Celeron systems, for about a $1.50 more per unit at wholesalers cost. But for that $1.50 the end-user usually got a much more stable dial-up connection at a higher baud rate (usually above 48K). But I'm sure at the corporate level a savings of $1.50 per unit looked good. KC |
#16
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You are wrong there Shooter. Sheep are buying 3rd world built ****
(HP, Compaq. EMachine, etc.) in record numbers from Hack store fronts like Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, Sears, Best Buy, etc.... The Sheep are also still going crazy over the mail order Taiwanese **** with the Dell name stamped on it and GW, well GW is Dead, Dead, DEAD... It just doesn't realize it. It is only holding on because it added cheap **** Taiwanese Plasma's to its "****" line of 3rd world offerings. Even the government said that this past Christmas showed a record sales of computers from these Hack Store fronts selling cheap 3rd world **** with their names stamped on them. Same for Dell and their Taiwanese line of ****. No Shooter, the Sheep are still too stupid and closed sighted to understand the long range value of going for quality coupled with local support over that of cheap assed **** from Taiwan with an American Company name stamped on it with no noticeable support (GW, Dell, HP, Compaq, EMachine, etc., etc., etc..........) NIK Shooter wrote: That may have been true 5 years ago but people are starting to wake up, even Nik's Sheep. I see a lot more people that have no idea about computers except how to turn one on and punch the keyboard for word processing results and emailing the kids on the weekend starting to approach the local White Box builders for their next system. So you might ask why someone so ignorant of computers would start looking at White Boxes over GW, Dell and those other fake computer companies. Because they are starting to see that quality backed by local support is actually a better value in the long run even if the cost is a couple of hundred bucks more in the short run. You don't have to be computer literate to "finally" figure that out, even for Sheep. |
#17
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That reminds me. I am running XP Home on 512 meg of mem. Will an
additional 512 give me the added performance to justify the $116 crucial price for a 512 stick of DDR PC2100? Thanks... NIK *** Email Address is a spam trap... Do Not Use *** Ben Myers wrote: I still have 90% of my hair even though I can't persuade people from buying the cheap junk sold in stores and elsewhere. I build no more than a half dozen white boxes a year. The money is to be made cleaning up messes made by other people, either the manufacturers or the computer owners themselves with poor decisions. Small networks are not as plug-and-play as everyone pretends they are. Wifi has its tricky elements. People need Cat 5 runs between office cubes and patch panels. Hard drives crash, and I replace them even under warranty, because clients quickly learn to value their data. Adware, spyware and other varmints regularly inhabit computers. Stores and name brand mfrs (e.g. Dell) regularly sell low-ball computer setups. This past week, I sold and installed 5 memory upgrades to P4 XP systems which had been delivered with only 256MB. My clients considered me a miracle worker for figuring out how to speed up their systems so much. I can get white boxes assembled from my local distributor for $25 over the price of the individual parts, but everyone in my area is so enamored by Dell or the latest sale at Circuit City, that the selling cycle is not worth the time to sell a white box. My cardiologist has eMachines garbage running his office, less reliable than my ticker and circulatory system. Go figure. I go with the flow... Ben Myers On Sat, 28 May 2005 22:53:29 -0400, Shooter fhasfdjh@AlkjdaF@com wrote: On Sat, 28 May 2005 21:34:44 GMT, ben_myers_spam_me_not @ charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote: That's what I've seen in the last year or so of fixing or refurbing these beasts... Ben Myers I don't see how you keep from pulling your hair out Ben. BTW, I assume you offer quality built, locally supported White Boxes to your community. Got a business web site for us to see your work? Regards, |
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#19
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#20
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On Sun, 29 May 2005 09:57:05 -0500, "Kevin Childers"
wrote: The way that the big guys hold down cost is to cap the price they are willing to pay for a given component. And that is just fine for the $399 pieces of Taiwanese junk out there. If someone wants such junk and knows WHY it is only $399 then go for it. However, these immoral companies market this junk is if it were the cutting edge of the industry and make the buyer (Sheep) think it is made by Americans in American Shops located in America. LIES! All LIES! You wouldn't believe how many people think that if it has "Intel Inside" then it must be made by Americans in American Shops located in America. Hell, from what I am told, the "Intel Inside" Processor isn't manufactured in America any more. Then you have the ones that make the "Sheep" think that their $999 Taiwanese system is 3 times the system of their $399 Taiwanese system when in fact it is just packaged in a prettier box and has a larger HD and more memory, probably no more than $100 worth of actual upgrades to what was in the $399 system or $10 more if buying this crap by the freighter load. Its not just the computer industry but corporate mentality in all fields, all over the globe. Its "Let's stick a hard one up the Arse of the buying Public". And as long as you have your lobbyists pay the politicians off by giving them money, exotic trips and whores, then there's no one there as watchdogs. But its so easy when the worlds so full of brain dead sheep. Regards, |
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