Recent Spadina/College retail experience

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

A subject near and dear to my heart.  I love bargains.

All the advice has been good.

I like going to Factory Direct to see what they have.  But I don't
trust it a lot: all the stuff is refurb, inexpensive, and dubious
original quality.  But there are worthwhile bargains.  Just buy things
from knowledge, not ignorance.  (Example: I bought a bunch of
Myth-friendly TV tuner cards at $30 each.)

For parts, I've had good transactions with CTY, Canada Computers,
Sonnam, Filtech, and others.

As far as computers are concerned, I don't seem to build them myself
any more.  I find amazing bargains on prebuilt systems -- quieter and
cheaper than the ones I build myself.  Again, these bargains don't
happen to my timetable, but they do happen.

Off the shelf computers have gotten quite inexpensive in the last
couple of years.

Example: this week Future Shop was offering $150 off of online orders
for clearance computers priced at $500 and up (or $150 Gift Cert for
in-store purchases of clearance computers).  Some people got Acer
systems with Atlon 64 X2 3800+ for $400 and $450.  FS revised the
online price upward and is now out of stock:
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0665000FS10079765&logon=&langid=EN#

These store-bought systems are not perfect.  Built-in video has no TV
out or DVI.  There are fewer PCI slots than I'd like.  BIOS updates
are rarer than for motherboards sold retail (so upgrading the CPU
is less likely to work).  Documentation isn't as complete.  You get
MS Windows whether you want it or not (but it appears to add little to
the price).  You don't get to choose the components so some may have
no Linux support (my luck has been worse with notebooks).

P.S.  Is Jumbo Computers related to Jumbo Empanadas?
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