Sunday
I decided to see how far I could get by researching online exclusively (and besides, it was Sunday morning, what other crazy people are working?).
Here’s what I found on the Web:
Dell
Dell says it moves several million dollars a day in PCs over its website. The company has certainly reinvested some of that money into a useful configuration utility. I was shocked to end up with a $3,599 price tag for my desired PC. Dell must have consumer and corporate customers confused, so I won’t be adding to its hefty online transaction numbers.
NEC
An earlier model faired well in a review, and for $,578, the new SPL333 includes a 17-inch monitor. But in checking the specs closely, it doesn’t include a modem! Hello, did you guys ever hear of something called the Internet? It wasn’t a bad deal, but since they had no resellers located near my bro’s house, I decided to keep looking.
Gateway and Kingdom Computers
I tried to visit the Gateway site a few times, but each time I tried — to quote Mr. Fudd — the pages woaded vewy vewy swowy (eh eh eh), and eventually crashed my Navigator 3.0 browser. I also checked with Kingdom computer’s site, but it was generating funky database error messages. Figuring their sites were temporarily down, I moved on.
HP
I could hold back no longer — all along I was anxious to check out the latest HP Pavilions since I’ve been very happy with the HP desktops and laptops I have purchased in the past. Unfortunately, HP hasn’t put the same time and money into its website as other vendors, forcing me to to check out the specs for each model one at a time. I narrowed the list down to the 880 or 875 models with the only differences being a faster processor and more memory (333 MHz to 300, and 64 MB RAM to 48, respectively). The software bundle looked great, and the specifications of the peripherals such as the sound card and modem met our requirements.
I then jumped over to HP’s “Where to buy” page to find some HP dealers close to my brother’s suburban house. I came up with a list of five resellers within five miles. Not bad.
I called the Best Buy in Willow Grove, Penn., and quickly found that HP had listed the fax, not the phone number. So, I had to leave my protected T-1-driven universe, and call information to get the proper listing. The rather abrupt Best Buy salesman seemed disinterested in providing anything more than the minimum answers. I was quoted prices of $,400 for the 880, and $1,900 for the 875 (sans monitor on both).
I wanted to know if the DVD playback used hardware-assisted MPEG- playback or if it tied up the CPU with “software-only” DVD. Intel has stated that the faster Pentium II chips could handle high-quality DVD playback, but without verification, I wasn’t about to make guinea pigs out of my family members. I called two other area HP dealers, one of whom didn’t carry the models I wanted, and another that charged $100 more for each model. Alas, since the gentlemen retailers knew little of said DVD device, I said my farewells, and called HP’s 800 sales number to find out if it had more of a clue.
I was assigned to the friendlier and more knowledgeable Mike, who reaffirmed the differences between the HP models and answered another question that popped into mind about the modem: Yes, we would have to download the v.90 patch to upgrade the included modem to the 56K recent standard. (I guess having the vendors do that themselves is too much to ask.) Mike said that HP had a one-year warranty on parts and labor, not exactly the security blanket I was looking for.
Mike explained that the DVD-ROM is a Hitachi GD-000 that can read both sides of a DVD without having to flip it, another good question for y’all to keep in mind when considering DVD. But Mike couldn’t answer my query about software vs. hardware-assisted playback, so I set out to find the answers elsewhere. I read a review of the Hitachi GD-000 that described it as working well with several different MPEG playback cards. This wasn’t definitive enough for me, so I called Hitachi’s support line. I left a message and called it a day (it was Sunday, after all). My next call back from Hitachi will also be the first.
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