[NTLUG:Discuss] Hardware vendors in Dallas

[steve]

Kipton Moravec wrote:

> I like Fry's for everything except Motherboards. Almost everyone I have
> purchased there I have had to return at least once because it did not
> work out of the box. They have no new motherboards, only refurbished,
> and it appears those have not been tested well.

The trick with Fry's is to look at the products on the shelves and to
buy only the ones that don't have a 'returned' sticker on them.  They
do have new, unused motherboards - you just have to rummage through
the pile of returned ones to find an unopened one.

They are supposed to test returned items before they put them back on
the shelves - but they don't (or at least not carefully enough).

I once bought a 200Gig hard drive - got it home and found that inside
the box was a very used 50Gig drive from another manufacturer!!

Yeah - that was tested carefully!   When I complained, to their credit,
they didn't argue at all - and got me another drive.  That too had a
returned sticker on it.  When I installed it on my PC, I found it had
a copy of Windows-XP installed on it - but once I'd reformatted it for
Linux, it worked just fine.  However, that indicates that they don't
reformat returned drives - and sometimes they don't even check that
what's being returned is actually the item that was bought.

But if there is no returned sticker, it's irrelevent whether you buy
in Fry's or someplace else - so if Frys is cheaper and has a wider
range of stock - why not?

On the flip side, because their returns policy is so liberal, you can
buy something - and if you find (say) that whilst it works OK, Linux
doesn't support it or something - you can return it with no questions
asked.