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I found a number of sites that make finding and pricing computer hardware on the net pretty easy. One site is http://www.pricewatch.com/, which not only catlogs computer hardware parts for many different distributors and resellers, but has a nice search engine and you can even set-up alarms so that when a given product reaches or falls below a particular price, you'll receive an automatic email notification. Another, similar site is Computer ESP which not only has a large, searchable database but maintains mailing lists and even real-time chat rooms for virtually every component listed! Which maybe a bit extreme, but it's nice to know the option is there.
Date: 3/6/96
I've checked out prices in a variety of locally owned stores, as well as major chains. Most chains (Media Play, Office Depot, Electric Avenue, Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, etc.) do not carry a very wide selection of components. You won't find a case, you might find a video card or sound card (but it will probably be part of a Multimedia Kit), and your brand choices will be limited.
As for the locally owned stores, the prices have varied. One store called Cybertek Systems doesn't price their merchandise explicitly, but instead wants to deal with you, trying to undercut the prices you may find at other stores. However, their lack of straightforward answers to legitimate questions and the experience I had with a case I bought and returned makes them a definite "No" in my book.
Shicar Systems, another locally owned store offers some great deals and prices, seriously guarantee their work and have been around for more than 5 years now. The biggest disadvantage is that they will only sell one type and brand of a given component by itself, as they primarily deal in systems. They have a 486 board that meets most of my requirements for $125 USD, but unfortunately it is not Pentium upgradable and so I'll have to check out some more of the local merchants.
Date: 12/27/95
I have already purchased several issues of Computer Shopper magazine in an effort to determine basic prices for components such as a case or a motherboard. From the different ads I have checked, it looks like a good case that meets or exceeds my requirements can be had for as low as $50 USD. Because of that I will probably order my case well before I make my final motherboard choice.
The prices for motherboards seem to range from as low as $89 USD to as much as $1,500 USD, depending on CPU type, features, etc. However, the motherboards that I have seen which meet or exceed my needs tend to range from $300 to $400 USD.
I still have to do research to determine which brand of motherboard, CPU chip, etc. I should get, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of various features such as power management, "pipeline" cache, etc.
I started researching the Mitsumi drive in DejaNews, using a filter to check only newsgroups with the word "hardware" in the group name. I found quite a few matches for Mitsumi, though only a few for the FX-800 unit, which is a very recent model. There were a lot of questions from users about where to get drivers, as well as complaints that the Mitsumi drives did not support the ability to sample sound directly from an audio CD.
I decided to check the reputations of some of the other drives I had seen listed in the Pricewatch index as well as what was carried by Sparco. I also checked out the The Moan and Groan Page for complaints about CD-ROM drives. I found a lot of people had complained about hassles with both Teac and NEC brand drives, so I scratched them off my imaginary list.
I found a decent price ($130 USD) from Sparco for a Samsung SCR-830 drive. I found very few complaints about it in my searches with DejaNews, the only real complaint being about high CPU usage when playing audio CD's under Windows95 using software: a combination of factors I'm not likely to run into. So after some deliberation, I decided to go with the Samsung drive.
Date: 8/4/96
It's been more than a couple of weeks since I put my new system together (now dubbed "Not-A-Cray" for obscure reasons I won't go into here). My wife had promised be months ago she would buy me a CD-ROM drive for my birthday when I got my computer working, so now that she has the money to do it, we started to work on the research together.
First off, let me note that having two computers browsing the web simultaneously,
especially with a second person doing the browsing, can greatly accelerate
your research efforts. :)
First we checked Pricewatch
and looked up prices on 6X IDE CD-ROM
drives. We found most of 'em were available for $80 USD
or less and since my wife was willing to go up to about $150 USD
on the drive, we decided to check out the 8X
IDE CD-ROM drive prices.
We found quite a few drives, ranging from just under $100 USD
to about $140 USD. A variety of brands
and distributors were represented. We checked out several different distributor
pages. One of the better ones was Custom
Computer Systems, though I decided not to go through them due to the
lack of a secure on-line ordering method.
Date: 8/4/96
In terms of brands, I did a little poking around and found that the
Mitsumi
FX-800 seemed to be a nice drive and was available from several vendors
for a good price. Unfortunately, that does not include Sparco,
which carried it for about $20 USD more
than anyone else. But they are the only parts supplier on the net I've
been able to find that offer on-line ordering with secure forms.
I decided not to order right away, but do some research to see what
bad things I could dig up. That didn't start until several days later,
though.
The most vital component I need for a new system is the motherboard. Without a quality motherboard that is expandable and upgradable, I'd be stuck with a limited system. My general specifications for the motherboard left me with a lot of choices. I spent a lot of time checking both prices and specs in the Computer Shopper, as well as on-line.
I heard a lot about the Intel line of motherboards, specifically the Intel Advanced/EV, also known as the Intel Endeavor. This motherboard features the Triton chipset, which means it has a high performance level. It also has:
Other Intel motherboard specs can be found at http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/
While I wanted to get an ATI-brand card, I was having difficulty getting a local shop to order it. I also discovered that the card I was interested in, while multi-featured, is strictly 8-bit color. It seems rather pointless to buy a new video card and still only have a limit of 256 colors, max.
I started looking at other cards. One brand that caught my eye was Number Nine Visual Technology cards, which is a relatively new brand that's become quite popular (as evidenced by the incrediblly slow access time on their web site!). The features on the cards are many, they support 24-bit color, and the prices are good.
I consulted with a friend of mine who bought a Vision 330 a while back for his system. He considers it to be a nice card, at a good price (He paid $150 USD for it from Media Play several years ago, and that is undoubtedly one of the higher priced places to buy computer hardware!). It had no problem providing him flicker-free graphics while playing Quake under Windows-95.
Date: 3/3/96
One video card I'm looking at getting is the ATI
brand Video Xpression
video card. It features acceleration for MPEG software decoding, and you
can upgrade the video card with an MPEG daughterboard for pure hardware
MPEG decoding. You can also add on a TV tuner option to the card at a later
time. The Video Xpression also has several video acceleration features
oriented towards the gaming market. And it has all the old Mach64 support.
And a PCI version of this vard can be bought for about $189 USD,
a pretty low price for all the features you get standard.
Even with a 540 MB hard drive, I've found my free disk space getting rather tight. And since I want to eventually have at least several different operating systems installed on Not-A-Cray (Windows95, OS/2 Warp, and Linux), I've decided to purchase a much higher capacity hard drive.
I've already decided it should be a 2 GB hard drive... less would be silly (why buy a high-capacity drive that isn't really that high capacity?) and more would be over what I'm willing to spend (no more than $300 USD). And I've ruled out certain brands as being just too problematic (both Seagate and Western Digital are brands that seemed to be mentioned more often then others when the topic of bad hard drives comes up). I focused my research on Maxtor brand drives, as I've had good results with the 540 MB drive and they are a brand with a relatively good reputation. Their 2 GB capacity drive is dubbed "The Durango". So the major thing I had to do was find a good price for it, and purchase it. I turned to PriceWatch once more for my pricing and company research.
I was easily able to find a number of companies that sold the drive I was interested in for under $300 USD. Finding a reputable re-saler, on the other hand, was a bit more difficult. Companies I had previously dealt with either didn't carry the drive, or had it for a higher price than I was looking for. So I had to find a new company to order the drive through. With the help of PC Mail-Order Systems Rating Service and the PriceWatch homepage, I was able to significantly narrow my selections.
One company that came up which looked interesting was NECX. They're a large warehouse re-saler that offers secure, on-line ordering and an optional "club" membership through which you get a blanket, one percent discount on purcahses. Not really worth it unless you're in a business that needs to buy lots of hardware. I was intrigued by NECX so I dug around with DejaNews to see what sort of reputation they had. I found quite a few enthusiastic endorsements as well as some "They're ok, I have no complaints" sort of comments. The only real complaints I could find were those who thought you had to buy club membership to order (you don't). So I decided to go with NECX.
My wife bought me a new game for Christmas (The Neverhood) but it turned out I couldn't play it on my system. Seems that the game wants two DMA (Direct Memory Access) buffers to work with, and my old SoundBlaster 2.0 only had one. Unable to find any other solution (I.E. software patches or the like) I decided I'd just need to buy a new soundcard somewhat sooner than I had planned.
In the case of a soundcard, I didn't really need to do any research
for brands. I had already decided long ago that I wanted a SoundBlaster
brand sound card. While there are a variety of brands available out there,
most are sold as SoundBlaster compatible cards (and often weren't as compatible
as touted). The only other real competition was the Gravis UltraSound but
I wanted a card I knew I could use even with very old PC software that
was written before the GUS card was created.
I reviewed the models that Creative
Labs currently produces and decided the lowest end one would more than
suit my needs. The SoundBlaster
16 Plug'n'Play is actually a respectable sound card, and can be upgraded
to the equivalent of a SoundBlaster
32 with a simple add-on card. The SoundBlaster 16 has stereo sound,
can play 8-bit and 16-bit samples, has full software control of multiple
volume levels and balances, and so on.
I then focused on where to buy the card. At first I was going to try and just pick it up from a local store, as most places were selling it for about $100 USD. But it being only a few days after Christmas, everyplace I called was out of supply. So I resigned myself to having to mail-order the card and wait the extra time.
When I consulted PriceWatch, I found a range of prices from over the $100 USD average to around $65 USD. One of the prices was for $69 USD from a company called Aberdeen. When I checked out their web page I found they had a complete on-line ordering system with secure ordering, so I decided to go with them. Neither of the previous on-line companies I had gone through (NECX and Sparco) offered the SoundBlaster card at much below the average store price.
I decided that I wanted to upgrade my motherboard's RAM cache, to help boost performance. I currently have a 256KB cache and want to increase to 512KB. While this will not have a dramatic effect on overall performance, it's one of the cheapest upgrades you can do to a PC which does affect it.
Finding the module I needed proved harder than I thought, however. I need a 512 KB pipeline burst COAST module that is compatible with my Intel Advanced/EV motherboard. Searches with PriceWatch quickly showed that not many companies were selling 512KB modules at all, and only one company explicitly stated that the module was for the motherboard I have. Unfortunately, that company was Aberdeen.
I decided to go ahead and order the component from them, as I had never actually had an order processed on my previous attempt. I felt it was a good idea to give them one last chance, as their prices are extremely good (low).
Date: 2/97
When I originally assembled my new computer, I had 16 MB of memory, which seemed to be a good starting amount and was relatively cheap. In the time since then however, I found that 16 megs is sometimes only just sufficient, especially if you run memory-intensive operating systems such as Windows95. And at the same time, the price of RAM had dipped even lower.
So I decided to upgrade my memory. Since I had two free SIMM sockets that had to be filled together, I wanted to go for a fairly large increase. Once all your SIMM sockets are used, you can only upgrade memory by replacing existing SIMM chips (assuming you haven't maxed out your memory already) which is obviously not cost efficient. So I decided to get two 16 MB SIMM chips to upgrade to a total of 48 MB of memory.
Both NECX and SPARCO were charging significantly higher pricers for RAM than the market dcitacted at the time, so I scanned memory prices with PriceWatch and found an abundance of companies selling RAM. I had no brand preference, which helped in making choices. One company that came up (which I had not seen before in my searches) was The GR Company Store. They offered a 16 MB 60ns SIMM for only $69 USD, which works out to about $4.35 USD a megabyte, a pretty good price.
The final and probably most expensive component of my new system is the monitor. All this time I've still been using my old Packard Bell monitor, which has seen better days. However, monitors are expensive and unlike many other types of hardware, prices for monitors have not fallen significantly over time (though features and quality have increased a lot).
Thanks to an IRS refund and other resources, I've finally got enough money together to seriously research getting a new monitor. I new from the start I wanted at least a 17 inch monitor, and those cost at least $500 USD (range), so I had to wait until now to consider the purchase.
The first step when buying a new monitor is figuring out the minimal specifications and requirements for the new monitor. Once I had those, determining what monitor to get was more a choice of brand than of individual model. The key factors for a new monitor seem to be:
The major resource I have found to be of benefit for this research as been the on-line FAQ for the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video. The FAQ is chock-full of detailed answers relating to monitors, as well as video cards.
Another excellent resource I just recently discovered is The System Optimization page. This site specializes in information relating just to the sort of things I need - Reviews and ratings of hardware, mail-order companies, and techincal information for all sorts of hardware (as well as operating systems). They also have a bunch of benchmarking comparisons. I highly recommend checking this site out! I've already add my votes to the vendor surveys as well.
Date: 9/19/96
I located another useful resource for screening out potentially bad companies, called the PC Mail-Order Systems Rating Service. It's maintained by Bill Bereza as a sort of public service. People can fill out a simple web form to submit information on their experience with a particular PC mail-order company, assigning the company a rating. The results are presented for everyone to see in several formats, updated on a daily basis. So if you see a company with numerous "AVOID!" votes and no positive votes, you know that the company isn't worth dealing with.
Date: 8/12/95
One good page I've found to check when doing research on components is the Moan and Groan Page, which consists of summaries of complaints about various brands of products, as well as distributors and other related companies. The author accepts contributions from anyone who has had a bad experience with a company.
Checking his page lets you quickly discover if a company is a known bad one, as well as common hassles with certain particular components. It's definately worth checking out.
Date: 7/5/95
After I had made my decisions about what motherboard and video card I wanted to get, I had to order them. Determining who I should go with required quite a bit of research as well, since I wanted to avoid getting ripped off, but also wanted to pay a decent price for the parts.
Date: 12/27/95
I've begun my research by checking out issues of the Computer Shopper. Unfortunately, many businesses leave out details of their components (sometimes giving virtually no specifications at all!), and of course an advertisement is hardly an impartial source of information.
So I have turned to the resources of the Internet to assist me in my research. Fortunately, it is much easier to locate information on the Internet nowadays then it was 5 years ago, thanks to a large part to the advent of the World Wide Web and dramatic increase in commercial usage of the Internet.
Date: 12/27/95
I used DejaNews to look for postings about the various different types of expansion slots. However, while I found some postings to computer newsgroups that gave me useful information, I found more questions than answers, and many people seemed unsure on the exact nature of the different expansion slot types.
Date: 12/27/95
Searching with Lycos, I found a variety of information on expansion slots. The most informative and easy-to-understand one was part of a Yale homepage called Pc Lube and Tune. There I found a particular page that gave me a lot of detail about expansion slots, what a Bus is, and the different types of expansion slots (or Bus connectors). Based on that information, I found that my specs are, at the moment, good ones and I should stick with them. (I also found a nice techincal paper on PCI, as maintained by Hewlett Packard).
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