[TriLUG] local pc suppliers?

[Scott Chilcote]

Hello Maria,

Dunno if you're still shopping, but I can give a moderately strong 
recommendation for PC Warehouse if NW Maynard in Cary is convenient to you.

They aren't your people if you have a lot of Linux questions, but they 
have very reasonable prices and let you build up your system from a list 
of current componentry.  They will pre-install Windows or Linux, or give 
you a credit if you'd rather install the OS yourself.  I had them do 
this, but they installed Redhat anyway in order to test out the system.

One minus is that they don't have a web site, and a place like this can 
really benefit from one (e.g. Intrex).  They publish a list of available 
components and prices every week, as well as lists of Intel and AMD 
system options.  You have to stop in and collect the lists in order to 
see what they have.

I built an AMD system from their lists earlier this year, and the price 
was only slightly higher than mail order.  It was worth it to me because 
I didn't have to wait, pay multiple shipping and handling charges, and 
knew that if there was a problem I could get it resolved faster.

A couple of minor shortcomings - one was that the only IDE hard drives 
they had were Western Digital, and I stopped buying them a couple of 
years ago due to the problems they were giving me.  I went to Intrex for 
a Seagate IDE drive for my Windows partition.

I also got some SCSI U-160 drives from them (PC Warehouse), which turned 
out to need extra cooling.  They admitted to me that they discovered 
this when they went into thermal shutdown during the system burn-in. 
Guess they hadn't had much experience with those.  At least they were 
willing to tell me, and since the drives have extra long warranties I 
accepted them.

Hope this helps.

                              Scott

Maria Winslow wrote:
> Aside from Intrex, what local PC suppliers do you guys recommend? Have you 
> found any to be especially enlightened about OS choice?
> 
> Thanks,
> Maria
>