There’s this friend of mine whom I told a good configuration to buy a few months ago. He said he got the configuration and it was something like a Pentium D 805 with 512 MB RAM. Now yesterday when I went over to his home for the first time, I find that his ‘new’ PC he got assembled from a local dealer is nothing but junk.
Firstly, his Hard-Disk isn’t SATA, hell, when I got my rig 3 years back now, it was SATA and here he is, with an ATA. Second, his CD-ROM drive had a DVD-RW bezel on it. He kept complaining why it didnt burn DVDs and kept claiming it was a DVD-RW until I saw its properties that it was merely a combo. Wow, nice faking trick! So I told him its not a DVD-RW but just a combo drive and he got a Sony DW G170 or something 18x burner in a few hours. And he didn’t even bother calling the assembler. Plus, he bought the OEM drive, that’s foolish too. I like buying the normal ones with a box and manuals, CDs etc in it that help the drive perform better.
Ok, now I opened the case of his up to install the drive for him ( !@#$$%^ 
) and found that his motherboard isn’t what it seems, it wasn’t an Intel chipset, it was the mighty VIA crap one. AND it was from Kobian [Mercury]. Ha ha, it just had 2 RAM slots, just 2 ha ha (laughing cause my 865 has 4!) … and surprisingly, they were DDR and not DDR2.
Am not sure if its a good idea to put together a Pentium D 805 with DDR, but this guy was charged a lot. Actually, he said he blindly bought my config list as I gave him which had SATA, DDR2 in it. His bill’s charges are all of these good ones I told him.
Next up was his RAM. XP recognized only 256, I don’t know what was wrong, his board or the RAM module as I could see 2×256 MB attached. I decided to leave investigating more, I was nearly about to laugh at his foolishness there. Sigh.
When people do buy assembled goods, why the hell don’t they ask for the boxes and manuals they paid for? I remember when I got myself an assembled PC, i.e. my current PC 3 years ago, I asked him to give me all the boxes and manuals, and only then took the bill from him.
Heck, even though I was a newbie then, my curiosity saved me, I opened the case and had a look. Even though the paraphernalia inside still scares me very much, you do find some info or the other about the parts installed. Next you can try the BIOS, it tells what your product really is.
A simple list of what you can do to check your hardware is:
- Ask for all and any packaging material your assembler assembled with. Ask for the manuals contained in it too!
- Check your BIOS on boot up. Usually the first screen shows some basic info about the hardware inside.
- Open up the side panel, don’t be scared of it. Cause you know yourself you aren’t gonna unscrew stuff inside unless you know how to, so just open it up and have a look on the labels you can see inside. This way you can check if the brands you ordered are real for sure.
- Run utilities like Windows’ System Information tool, or CPU-Z to see the hardware contents of your system, right down from your motherboard.
And when you feel you’ve been cheated, go all out offensive. You paid for it! Take him/her to the consumer court if you have to!
WTF ? Tell ur friend to give one good dose to the dealer.
Manas
12 Feb 07 at 10:11 pm
Good post! Will save lot’s of newbies…
Thankfully my first PC(assembled) was exactly what I/we had asked for. Some people are lucky, others are screwed!
Rohit
12 Feb 07 at 10:29 pm
Buying a computer is like but a 2nd hand car these days, if you are the average consumer … it is a jungle.
A friend of mine bought a new computer in the UK and got a good deal. One day she came up to me and asked why the message “Your copy of Windows might not be genuine” meant. It turned out the shop had used a cracked copy of windows when they set her computer up.
lizze
13 Feb 07 at 12:16 am
Oh okay that guy got pwned. Badly. However, we’re probably all gonna go through this at some stage.
Wengistein
13 Feb 07 at 2:31 am
i’d rather not buy an assembled rig, coz it causes more pain and confusion. if i have to assemble it myself, i’d rather do the job myself that ask someone else. some dealers just rob you.
and yeah…it’s always recommended to check what hardware you have got, either with BIOS or or Hardware Configuration.
sauron.saurabh
13 Feb 07 at 8:37 am
Ohh,
That’s really SAD to hear.. ( But he did get pwned )
Anyways, I’ve changed 3 PCs so far and all the time, I’ve told the engineer to get the parts in their respective boxes, (unpacked) and open them right in front of eyes and assemble the PC
.
This way, it takes 2 hours to do the job but it saves a lot on what you have actually spent on..
Anyways also, I’ve started assembling my own PC now
DJ
13 Feb 07 at 9:04 am
Yeah I do agree I got a cracked copy Of Windows 98 when I bought my first PC badly enough I was in 5th or 6th grade knew nothing but how to open it.
Atleast Now I have everything after I got my new CPU. Hell I even have my case box.
karthiksn
13 Feb 07 at 1:07 pm
looks like ur friend’s got a lotta money to spare n hey checks his mail twice a week , so it doesn’t bother him whether it’s pentium d or celeron d .
Zeeshan
13 Feb 07 at 6:35 pm
First of all i would liek to to tell you that dont think your very smart!!! seriously!!! i ll tell you one by one why ur tryin to be a smart ass and making a fool ov urself… if you bought a comp 3 yrs ago with ddr2 ur running at a 400 FSB frequence for ur ram… Todays motherboards run 400 FSB DDR itself… SO technically except for the Noise to signal ratio loss there is no extra performance ur gaining with ur old DDR2 than the NEW DDR 400… Secondly what you saw and though was his CD TRAY was not a CD TRAY it was a cabinet Drive COvering Slot which just hides the actual drive behind and Shifts down to let the actual Tray to come out… And i am sure the assembler showed it was a combo… and ur friend bought a Micro ATX sized mother board to save on cost… My very Dear smart ass friend… These Motherboards cost almost a grand less and trust me you wouldnt need more than 2GB of system ram in today s condition… The two slots are more than enough… and seriously!!! if u think VIA chipsets r worse than the proprietary Intel Chipset… Dude u need to hang yourself… Any one can make out from your post that your totally immature in this field and trying to show that ur one smart ass… save the favour to others and please get proper knowledge before confusing people…
Deepsilentwaters
24 Mar 07 at 5:52 am