Re: Another: can't *not* buy Win95 on Dell or Gateway

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>]

At 12:40 AM 5/4/98 -0400, Linux Idiot wrote:
 
>I've personally had very good experience with a number of local shops. 
>I've not purchased a complete system, but built one piece meal,
>purchasing various parts from various vendors in order to get the best
>price.

There's the difference. You'll probably get a good machine if you do
it this way. But if you buy a complete machine from a local shop, it'll
probably be made in one of two ways. Many shops sell "generic" machines,
purchased from distributors' catalogs, and stick on their own labels.
Others hire cheap labor -- often, college students -- to assemble the
machines. These kids know little about how the machines work, and I often
help local businesses that can't get on the Internet because the machines
came with interrupt and port conflicts. There's one here in town that
I've heard called "Comedy of Errors Computers," because customers often
have to bring machines back three or four times to get them to work
right. I tried to get this shop on the Internet, but they couldn't set
up their own machine to run either Linux or NT properly. I finally gave up.

Ironically, these shops often charge as much as the mail-order outlets --
and one of the reasons is that they can't get quantity price breaks on
Windows. But they, too, often refuse to sell without Windows, because
they need to keep that volume up to prevent the price from going still
higher.

I build my own, insisting on SCSI hard drives, a dual SCSI adapter (one
bus for disks, the other for everything else), PCI peripherals, intelligent
serial cards, EPP parallel ports, and network cards with big buffers.
I sometimes assemble custom machines for local businesspeople. (I insist
that they buy the parts so I don't need to deal with sales tax deposits,
audits, etc.) I could probably go full-time with this, but have too many 
other irons in the fire. I drop FreeBSD onto all of the server machines;
one of them can do e-mail and Web pages for a moderate-sized company.

--Brett Glass