Paul, What is in the box, memory?, hard drive?, modem?, CDROM, monitor?? etc. I have never found Compaqs or Dells hard to compete against in a run off with a customer. What I cannot fight is the marketing of those makers who sell their products very well.
My screwdriver shops have a Cyrix 180GX board with sound built in, SVGAwith a 1.6Gig hard drive,16Meg DRAM, 1.44 floppy, 20X CDROM. Mouse, keyboard, with 33.6 modem, and speakers and detached SVGA color monitor(14") and we well it for $987 Canadian. That is $685 US$, and it is a standard box, expandable. The performance is about the same as a pentium 133MMX, but it is as fast as a 166MMX on some tasks. I suspect US screwdriver shops are comparable. We get 25 people a week wanting to upgrade Compaqs, and some have soldered CPUs, and the others we sell overdrives, at huge costs to them and profits to us.
In the store we shift about half the clients to bigger boxes, and only the dumb ones buy the closed Compaq boxes, my, there are a lot of them though.
Bill |
