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This in adition to having pretty much the cheapest "landed cost" of anyone. I have bought from them like 6 times and never had a problem. They even gave me a $20 rebate due to pretty much my own mistake, as I had overlooked that a ASUS NForce MB didn't have an integrated Network adapter.

No connection with company, only want to reward someone that does a serious good job.

1) Offer no support
2) Send you broken items and charge a 25% "restocking" to return them
3) Not send anything at all and claim loss in shipping
4) Any number of other sleazy tactics

I suggest that you filter anyone you choose to buy from through Reseller Ratings. I rarely have problems when dealing with people high on their list.

As surprising as it might seem, letting that local shop order components for you and assemble it may actually be cheaper than buying the components yourself. The days of 50% markup over cost on PCs are long gone, now it's more like 2-5%. The shops can buy in volume and get better deals than you can. Come up with a spec on your PC and ask some of the local shops for a quote before buying the components yourself.

Try Reseller Ratings. When I used to buy individual parts routinely, I always checked out suppliers there first, to see how good they were for speed of delivery, customer service, and most importantly, returns.

I personally use the same vendors most often but will use pricewatch to find deals when buying individual parts. my Fav vendors are:

• www.newEgg.com
• www.mwave.com
• www.hyperMicro.com (for scsi)
• www.axiontech.com
• www.2coolPc.com (oc cooling stuff)

Before you buy from ANYWHERE, check out ResellerRatings. You may not thank yourself (or me :-) later, but at least you won't be cursing yourself and the fly by night vendor that screwed you. Just remember to keep in mind: People (in general) are much more likely to bitch about bad service than praise good service.

That said, I've been really happy with NewEgg for equipment. For some higher end (or rather specific) cooling equipment, 2CoolTek is really good. Crucial is great if you're looking for high-quality RAM. PCBoost has never given me any trouble when dealing with less expensive RAM. And everyone and their brother will mention Pricewatch. :-) And although they aren't always the cheapest, Axiontech has always treated me right as well.
People have said good things about MWave, but I ordered a pair of NICs from them a while ago and they shipped in an old motherboard box without any padding -- rattling around loosely! Luckily they both worked.

But these are just MY experiences -- yours may vary.

be sure to check out these customer reviews of online retailers.

check http://resellerratings.com to see other customers opinions about the shop. Pricewatch may find you the cheapest prices, but bad service will cost you more pain and suffering in the long run than a couple of $$.

I've also had good luck with newegg (which many other people also pointed out) which receives a 9.41 rating!

Pricewatch is useful, but before you take the lowest price, check them out at Reseller Ratings. Sometimes it's better to spend the extra $10 and avoid the rip-off artists.

wherever you buy, check them out here first.

...needless to say, i learned the hard way

I use Pricewatch in conjuntion with ResellerRatings to find the best prices on hardware from reputable companies.

Computer Reseller Ratings

Some of these places will just sell you parts, but others do build complete custom systems. Read through the reviews and visit the sites to see if any of them will build what you want.

If you do go with Pricewatch, make sure you check the reseller on ResellerRatings Too many times I've found a 'wonderful' price to find that the users at resellerratings have had real runarounds with the company. They're pretty accurate...

My experience has been that when you're too busy to handle your own hardware/software support, you should find a competent local firm who can build machines to your specifications, support them, and provide warranties.

I have found that name-brand systems (i.e. Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc.) are overpriced, underfeatured, and have a very limited hardware upgrade path.

When you find a local computer reseller who will provide you with the support you need you can get the AMD systems you want with the componentry you want, without the hassle of taking the time to order, build, and load them.

This arrangment is especially valuable if any of your hardware is DOA. The vendor will take care of any returns. You only get working hardware.

Finding a competent local vendor is tough. Everyone thinks they know their hardware and their hardware is the best. It pays to go with someone who has been in business at least a couple years. Talk to their customers and get feedback. Check out ResellerRatings.com for comments on some of the larger resellers.

Good luck.

Apparently not many other people like Best Buy either: they are rated at 1.54 out of 10. Check out more comments at www.resellerratings.com snoslayer

It looks like somebody might have hit the jackpot. Especially the guy who got arrested. INAL, but lying to the police to get somebody arrested doesn't sound good. All that damage to his reputation, emotional distress, etc.. Talk to some attorneys--fast--and before saying another word to anyone else.

And everyone, please help prevent this sort of thing happening again by reporting your experience to the on-line rating services. Best Buy, if that's the right company has an 8.2 out of 10 rating at BizRate.COM. 2,000 angry customers can fix that. Although at Reseller Ratings they're already at 1.54 out of 10. Not much fixing needed there. For more info, take a look at:

BizRate: Best Buy Rating 8.2

Reseller Ratings: Best Buy Rating 1.54

There are more rating services, but that's a start.

And in other *awful* news, one of the casualties of the death of the free Internet appears to be ResellerRatings. That was a site that I *used*.

I see fraud going way up after this...

Pricewatch turns up a lot of dishonest vendors. I cross-reference price-watch hits with reseller ratings. Over time, I developed a few favourite vendors that proved reliable and had good service. There's only so much I'm prepared to do to save a dollar, especially when saving that dollar often costs you the peace of mind that dealing with an honest vendor gives you.

After going to Pricewatch, make sure you look up the business on ResellerRatings.com.

With few exceptions, the price is proportional to rating. The lowest prices on Pricewatch are almost always from disreputable resellers.

The truth of the matter is, more people are willing to pay extra to get quality. Case in point: my first online purchase (2 years ago) was a CD burner, and I bought it from the retailer who had the cheapest price. Three months later, still without my CD burner, the company (TheBigStore.com) was out of business, and my $200 was gone.

You never just buy from whoever has the cheapest Pricewatch entry. I've bought plenty of stuff from vendors who list their prices with Pricewatch, but I always cross-reference a vendor with its score at ResellerRatings to get a feel for whether the company in question is on the up-and-up. Since I've started checking prices this way, I've gotten reasonable prices and I've never been burned.

I had a set of scripts that would search Pricewatch for an item and ResellerRatings for vendor scores, and then merge the two together so that you'd get scores alongside prices. I'm not sure if it'd still work, since it relies on screen-scraping (HTML parsing, really) to extract data from the two websites. (A quick check indicated that the sites have changed enough that the scripts would need to be fixed.)

Look at ResellerRatings.com for information to see if the retailer if reputable. If you have a bad experience with a retailer, then post that information on that site. Companies will change their ways or go out of business if they are held accountable.

If something is too good to be true, it probably is.

Always check out the vendor's Reseller Ratings and take a look at the comments. If you find a good price, make sure you know other people's issues (or praises). Anytime I hit a new vendor, I always check them out first...

quote
Tiger Direct seems to have a mixed reputation for service
/quote

Here is Tiger Direct's Reseller Ratings rating table:
Overall Score for Tiger Direct:2.8/7.0

These are in yes/no form:
Do you feel that you received a fair/competitive price for the item that you purchased from the company? 110/22
Were the salespeople courteous, knowledgable, and helpful? 43/72
If the product you purchased was shipped to you, did it arrive as expected without any delivery problems or delays caused by the company? 72/60
If you returned a product to the company for exchange or refund, did they exchange the product without a big hassle or refund your money without a large restocking fee? 10/64
Would you buy any products from the company again? 41/90
Would you recommend the company to a friend? 37/93
Overall, were you satisfied with this company? 43/92

Link:
http://www.resellerratings.com/cgi-bin/reseller/ve ndone.cgi?TigerDirect

Note: I've never used Tiger Direct nor do I know anything about them. I'm merely stating the information found on the website mentioned above.

It's nice to hear you had a good experience with PayPal. I've only rarely used it, but I was recently pointed to Paypal Warning.

The page lists all sorts of articles with negative comments about Paypal. Apparently it has gotten a 3 out of 7 on Reseller Ratings (where everything is scored by customers). They also have a Paypal Wall of Shame with "unedited horror stories".

The thing that grabbed my attention the most, however, was the following on the front page:

WARNING:

Your Paypal account can be frozen at any time, without advance notice leaving you without your money for weeks (if not forever), and there isn't much you can do about it.

Any thoughts, folks?

No connections to either company except as a satisfied customer.

No connections to either company except as a satisfied customer.

I've scanned the various vendors I found on ResellerRatings.com, and I've found that a lot of the small-scale screwdriver factories offer better prices than Dell or Gateway.

My recommendations:
Go with athlon/duron and slash hundreds off your price.

Make the website as professional as you can. Pick a good name. If you appear successful people will often assume you are.

Make your life easier; make windows the default OS. You'd have problems otherwise.

Don't bet on it succeeding. Look at it like a restaurant; you'll most likely go out of business. Try it if you think you can have fun with it, but don't bet the family farm that it will be successful.
--

PayPal probably shouldn't be the ONLY option for most transactions, especially for big ticket items and because of the extra steps, but then again, neither should the only shipping options be FedEx or UPS.

Ironically, most of the stuff I bought with PayPal from small shops came shipped via Priority Mail faster and cheaper than the shippers.

P.S.: This isn't the forum, but I have been at every extreme of satisfaction and displeasure with online merchants -- call it experience. I am extremely pissed off with Plycon (I won't give them the satisfaction of a link). My card failed AVS even after I changed addresses with the bank, and they were not at all the helpful, professional, or friendly people they are described as at Reseller Ratings. They have since gotten a PayPal account but I refuse to do business with them... YMMV.

I sold them a large amount of computer surplus recently and I was originally quoted $1909 for all the parts. After repeatedly sending emails and bieng told "the check will go out tomorrow", I finally got paid $1800 almost a month after I sent the parts. I've emailed them several more times asking about the rest of my payment and they refuse to answer my emails.

Apparently I'm not alone in my hatred for this company. Check out Reseller ratings. They have a very low score compared to many other retailers.

LiNT

I dunno, seems like Lynx is a pretty decent browser to me. I've only had one crash while using it, and that was when the power went out.

I must've forgotten that, or maybe I should've clarified IE as being a graphical browser. I occasionally fire up Lynx to view sites that I know aren't too f*cked-up to not display properly in Lynx (my site is standards-compliant and Lynx-friendly, FWIW), though I more often use Lynx as the retrieval part of a screen-scraper application to pull data off of websites. (I'm currently working on something that'll merge price information from Price Watch and vendor ratings from ResellerRatings so that you can find the best price for computer equipment without getting burned by the bottom-feeders who post lowball prices. I have the retrieval part figured out for both sites; now I just need to merge the two together. I could use MySQL, but that seems like overkill...)

Well, ok. I can get a thunderbird for ~$188. Still beats $192, other things being equal.

I was about to make a comment along the lines of "but how good a vendor is that particular Pricewatch lowballer," but they didn't fare too badly on ResellerRatings.com. OTOH, there hasn't been a particularly large amount of feedback about that firm yet. In any case, going with whoever has the lowest price on Pricewatch can be a recipe for trouble if you're not careful.

(No, I don't work for ResellerRatings...or Pricewatch, for that matter. I'd recommend using the two sites in combination, though...it's better to pay a little more to deal with a reputable company than to get fleeced by a lowballer.)

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

• There are lots of idiots out there who want to sell you substandard components and switch your ordered part for something 'just as good'. Always send it back. I almost exclusively order parts from websites (the only exception is when the price listed at pricewatch.com doesn't match the website price). I usually order something simple first, just to test the site out, then order components. Sure, it takes longer to do things this way, but you save hundreds of dollars.

--

For those who mentioned getting bad hardware because they bought the cheapest stuff they could find on Pricewatch, there's another site you should look at before you decide to where to buy. Check out Reseller Ratings to find out how lots of electronic retailers are rated by their customers. When I was shopping for PC parts a couple months ago, I went back and forth between these two sites extensively to find the best place to buy, and I didn't have any problems with my purchases (yet) even though I ended up buying hardware from 7 or 8 different sites. They list an absolute ranking for each site in several categories, and also display any submitted comments in case you're more interested in anecdotal rankings of the sites.

I should point out that I'm not affiliated with either site, I've just been happy with the information found there. Your experiences may vary (and I'm sure I'll hear about it below :).

Executive Summary: 1.9/7.0, I'd avoid.

Alex Bischoff
---

Executive Summary: 1.9/7.0, I'd avoid.

Alex Bischoff
---

I went to www.resellerratings.com, and CPU Micromart had a dismally low average rating of 1.7 on a scale from 1 to 7. Many many comments from people who didn't receive what they ordered, received dead-on-arrival machines, had huge trouble dealing with staff trying to return things, simply got ripped off and didn't receive anything, etc...

What supercheap-preinstalled-Linux-box vendors would people here actually recommend based on personal experience?

I went to www.resellerratings.com, and CPU Micromart had a dismally low average rating of 1.7 on a scale from 1 to 7. Many many comments from people who didn't receive what they ordered, received dead-on-arrival machines, had huge trouble dealing with staff trying to return things, simply got ripped off and didn't receive anything, etc...

What supercheap-preinstalled-Linux-box vendors would people here actually recommend based on personal experience?

I went to www.resellerratings.com, and CPU Micromart had a dismally low average rating of 1.7 on a scale from 1 to 7. Many many comments from people who didn't receive what they ordered, received dead-on-arrival machines, had huge trouble dealing with staff trying to return things, simply got ripped off and didn't receive anything, etc...

What supercheap-preinstalled-Linux-box vendors would people here actually recommend based on personal experience?