[plug] packaged brand-name PCs vs custom

[Michael Holland]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Senectus - wrote:

> Because I've done it to death already.
> My last 10 years in buying PC's was hunting down the parts I wanted thinking

Fair enough. But one could just go to a single vendor, tick off the
motherboard, CPU speed, RAM size, HDD, etc required. Then the vendor can
confirm they are compatible, assemble test and guarentee it.

Lst I checked, the brand-name boxes were poor value in Australia, though
they competed well with custom boxes in the USA.

That is, component prices are good here, but we paid a considerable
premium for American brand names like Dell and Compaq. Perhaps the
'Optima', as a Dick Smith (ie Woolworths) brand is better?

> something of importance I'd buy IBM or HP, because YES they do have good
> support.. and they have linux supported drivers.

 From personal experience with HP/Compaq's Indian support, I beg to
differ!