What should you ask when buying a computer system?

In: Computer Buying

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Answer

You need to determine what you want to do with your computer. This will tell you what you should buy. Here is a must read, http://www.viewz.com/shoppingguide/compbuy.shtml

One of the first questions you should ask is about support,no pc deal is a good deal if they dont offer support and back their product line.If you find an honest dealer,he or she will sit down with you and help you decide what pc is best for you

Answer

Ask about what CPU is in there. If you are an AutoCAD drafter or play games that even the Dell XPSes can't handle and they try to sell you an overpriced Celeron or Sempron, leave. They don't know what they are talking about. Those are just for basic home users and kindergarten classes. Ask to pop open the case and see what's inside. If you see brands like Western Digital, Maxtor or those kinds of names for the hard drive, and AMD or Intel for the processor, and NVIDIA, ATI for the graphics card, etc... in general you're getting a decent PC. Since PC salespeople only know rudimentary computer stuff in general, I would do research online.

When at the store, I just politely asked to be left alone and ask if I can see the internals. I will withhold the store and the brand of PC that I was going to purchase, but I was about to pay $600 for a PC that had a hard drive with its entire label in Chinese--not good. No name brand, certifications or anything. Scary! There was a Core2 processor with out a fan, just a small heatsink!

From newegg.com, I can build a PC with 1 GB ram, a 2.2GHz AMD64 processor, a DVD burner and a 250 GB hard drive for about $190. Consider building.

Power supplies: the manufacturers see this as an opportunity to get cheap because there really isn't a name for them like for processors (Intel) and hard drives (Maxtor) and so on. Cheap power supplies = early death for PCs, esp. if you live where lightning frequents or you use your vacuum a/c and washer a lot.

First answer by Clay. Last edit by Unixwld. Contributor trust: 10 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 105 [recommend question]

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