What ever happened to the phrase “You get what you pay for” in business?  Is it just me, or does that translate as “If I pay a lot of money on something, I should get something of quality in return.”?  It is sure true in many industries, generally speaking.  If you pay a lot of money for something – like a house – and get something of poor quality in return, you’re going to be mad, right?  If you bought an expensive house and it was not worth ½ of what you paid, you’re going to report the builder to every agency possible to prevent it from happening to others, right?  Well, this type of thing is a daily occurrence in the computer industry, but for some reason, the horror stories are widespread, but nothing is done about them.

OEM manufactures are starting to get really bad about cutting corners and then selling their machines overpriced.  This creates many problems for PC Technicians- although we can thank OEMs for keeping us in business – because we end up being the ones to break the bad news to the end users.  The news is not exactly welcome to someone who paid near a thousand dollars (in some cases more, or less) for a system; telling someone like that that their PC relatively new system is a POS (with lack of a better term) does not go over well at all.  Trust me, I’ve said it many times over the last two years!

Cutting corners, you say?
I have noticed the trend in the last few months, but it never really occurred to me the extent to which it had fallen.  I serviced two computers over the last two weeks that really surprised me, quality wise, and that’s not a good thing.

The Dell
I helped configure a fairly top of the line system for a good friend about 2 years ago.  When I say top of the line, I mean: Pentium 4 Northwood 2.4C, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800, 80 GB IDE hard drive, DVD burner, XP Pro, and Office 2003.  Including Office, this system cost over $2,000.  He was extremely happy with his decision, but a few weeks ago, his happiness was shaken a little bit.

He had been having minor issues with his video card when playing Battlefield 2, but we just shrugged those problems off because similar problems had been happening to many other ATI users.  However, a few weeks ago, his card simply died.

When I went over to inspect the problem, I found that instead of a decent brand of video card (like the ATI that was said to be in there), it had no brand name.  It was just some generic card with an ATI chipset.  When I ran diagnostics, I found that the fan had died, and the card failed to trigger the overheat shutdown quick enough, and it fried the whole card.

So, we took the chance to buy a 9800 pro and an extra 512 MB of RAM for the system.  We ordered off Newegg, and I swapped the 9800 for a Nvidia TNT2 32 MB PCI video card (old, but sufficient).  A few days went by, and I get a call from him again.

“Tyler, my hard drive died.”

This friend is pretty good at computer troubleshooting, so he was able to do the diagnostics himself, and sure enough, the drive was dead when I checked it out.  It was making a very musical CLANK CLANK CLANK as it started to spin – that isn’t a good sign!  Turns out, this drive happened to be a Deskstar (known as a Deathstar by those who worked with them, they are not quality and have a reputation for death)

The parts from Newegg were scheduled to get in the next day, so we really didn’t want to wait another week before getting another hard drive, so he just went to Wal-Mart and picked up a Seagate 80 GB hard drive (paid a little more, but it was worth it to get it immediately).  We decided it would be best to wait until we got the new parts in to re-install the OS on the hard drive.

The next day, the parts come as they were supposed to, and we got everything patched up and ready to go.  However, there were a few things I noticed as I was doing the service:

1. The memory that was installed was PC2700 – which is not the proper spec for a C class Pentium 4, because it won’t run at 800 MHz.
2. Although SATA is supported by the motherboard, it wasn’t used, nor did the power supply support it.
3. The Deskstar hard drive was 5400 RPM.  Standard drives are 7200 RPM right now.

So, he paid tons of money for a good computer, and was given sub-standard parts.  Isn’t there something wrong with that?

The HP
Last week, a friend sent me a message and asked if I could help him find upgrades for his HP computer.  I said sure, and asked what he needed.  He said that he wanted RAM and a video card, so he could play games and such on his computer with decent frame rates.

I did some research, and found that the computer (which he bought in January) used proprietary RAM that would have to be specially designed for his computer (so it had to be done in the Crucial Configuration site.  Non-generic = lots of money).  A stick of 256 MB PC3200 RAM was going to cost $50, 512 $100, and 1024 $150.  This is almost a 100% markup of current market prices for generic RAM.

Now for the kicker, the motherboard that was used did not have a video-capable expansion slot.  No PCI-E/AGP slot for a potential video card upgrade, and PCI graphics are a tad outdated.  So much for upgrading.

Why is it that computer manufacturers can get away with such things?  People are getting ripped off, and they can’t stop it, because they aren’t aware.  My advice?  Build your own computer – you get what you pay for in knowledge and money.  Knowledge is something Pre-Builts can not offer.