My baby is getting up there in age and I’ll probably replace her soon (sorry honey!) Thing is, last time I bought a new one, I had a guy put it together for me and really regretted it. Since he only made a tiny bit of money on doing it for me, there was no incentive for him to help me out when I had problems with it. So now I’m thinking service is KEY.
Thing is, I live way out here in Linkou. I know a really reliable shop in Taipei, but don’t want to drive there every time I have an issue. So it occurred to me that there are 3K (Can Kun) stores (the big yellow and black electronics stores) practically everywhere - including one 10 minutes from my apartment, and they seem to have decent service.
Package deals from those type of stores generally suck. There’s always something in the deal that is not up to snuff, so to speak. That’s my two cents.
I bought a HP laptop in June 2005. Backlight went dead, 6 months after warranty expired.
Brought it back to the 3C shop in Neihou (where their HQ is) argued a bit that it was CRAp and that they sold CRAP. Still being polite explaining this hehe
Got my PC back, 3C paid the repairs (Saw the invoice asking for 12.540TWD). That is what I call service.
Nothing wrong with them, but hey, if you shout loud enough, you might get better served I guess…
I could have gone to K-mall and would have ended up with no service at all, saving maybe 1000 TWD.
Costco has an unlimited returns policy… Although not sure how it works here.
It all comes down to what you use your PC for.
Figure out what you need first, then start asking the questions.
You can pick up an affordable all singing all dancing PC these days, but if you want to play the latest 3D games or if you work a lot with audio and video, you might want to spend a bit more. Also consider what stuff you have, if you can re-use anything, like the monitor for example.
I think that wouldn’t work if you have trouble after a few months and just need some minor repairs or a replacement part.
[quote=“TheLostSwede”]It all comes down to what you use your PC for.
Figure out what you need first, then start asking the questions.
You can pick up an affordable all singing all dancing PC these days, but if you want to play the latest 3D games or if you work a lot with audio and video, you might want to spend a bit more. Also consider what stuff you have, if you can re-use anything, like the monitor for example.[/quote]
Good advise.
Don’t touch Cankun (3C) with a ten-foot pole. I could tell you my hard-drive story, or my laptop story, but it’d be nearly as tedious reading them as it was experiencing them.
[quote=“TheLostSwede”]Figure out what you need first, then start asking the questions.
You can pick up an affordable all singing all dancing PC these days, but if you want to play the latest 3D games or if you work a lot with audio and video, you might want to spend a bit more. Also consider what stuff you have, if you can re-use anything, like the monitor for example.[/quote]
Sounds like pretty heads-up sensible computer-buying advice. Well put Lost Swede.
At the very least, don’t go to Cankun (bright yellow, Chinese name is 燦坤) 3C but the Shunfa 3C (順發). Shunfa has better prices for hard drives, memory cards, etc. though I’ve never bought a computer there. I’ve gotten excellent service from them as well. For instance, once I purchased a SATA-II hard drive enclosure but inside the box was an IDE enclosure. Went back to the store and got a new one right away.
I’ll second what alidarbac just said. Cankun 3C is terrible - the staff at my local one run away and hide whenever I go in there. However, at Shunfa 3C, I recently bought an external harddrive plus enclosure that my computer couldn’t see in order to format. I took it back and they fixed the problem in about 5 minutes, for free. Turned out that I hadn’t connected a cable properly. Oops.
I bought my laptop on Yahoo. Haven’t had an issue yet (except for my wife yesterday plugging a USB Bluetooth device in, thinking it was a USB drive - which disabled the wireless card, and hence I had about 10 minutes of frustration today at the office trying to figure out why I couldn’t get online and why the card wasn’t working).
My desktop was bought from the computer market in Taichung (DianZi Jie), and never had an issue either. Fairly good stuff, and a decent deal. Can’t remember what it was, but I remember posting it here if you want to do a search.
You can probably just go to a local PC shop and have them build it for you like in Guanghua. Make sure that all the parts he puts into it have some sort of recognizable name like Asus, MSI, Western Digital, Hitachi, ATI, Nvidia, etc. Install the OS by yourself. Use the disks provided from each part, particularly the motherboard and video card drivers after you install the OS. Each part should have a manufacturer’s guaranty. You may have to do a little research at first but in the end it maybe worth it as service from the end retailer is generally crap. However, service from the manufacturer is generally good from my experience. Even better than in the US in some cases. In other words, you may not get your money back, but you will get a new part. If you post your needs and post a spec you picked up at a market, maybe someone here can give you a bit of advice.
Well put Lost Swede.