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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Spots who wrote (1936)	8/13/1998 8:53:00 PM
From: Len	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

I'd just like to add a point I haven't seen mentioned having to do with warranties and service contracts. For what it's worth, my partial solution has always been to use a Gold Visa or Mastercard, as well as some other Gold cards. With all of these, you get 90 days of purchase assurance should something break, and a doubling of the manufacturers' or retailers' warranty, up to an additional year, on warranties of up to three years. I can speak from experience, having had to use the double warranty approximately nine times in the last four years for various component failures. Frankly, with PC's, you probably have more failures per purchase than most any other consumer products. I can also add that in every case, I haven't had one single problem getting paid quickly and fully. This has been the case with both Visa and Mastercard. Just food for thought.... Len

To: Spots who wrote (1936)	8/16/1998 6:28:00 AM
From: Michelino	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Re: The Worth of Service Contracts If you can't afford the loss, whatever form "can't afford" might take, be it downtime or monitary or embarrassment or whatever, THEN you should definitely consider the contract. This is an individual decision which is completely outside the economic analysis of the service contract. No, it would appear to be integral to any economic analysis that would accompany the decision to use service contracts. Besides, you are applying monetary value only to the parts and ignoring the economic value of the actual service and diagnostics. So this is one area where your overall analysis doesn't work for me: Either the contractor will make money at it on the average or will be out of business or unable to provide service when its needed. This is independent of the contract or its terms, by the way. Therefore, YOU (or anyone) will make money in the long run by giving these contracts a miss. Let me at first accept this categorization. There could be an extended period where the service organization is losing money and still providing adequate service. I have used such companies for a couple of years before they went (sadly) belly up. They lost money on me and the ten PC's that were covered. Not the other way around, my company made out quite nicely. (In fairness, the average hard drive was 40 Meg in those days and the failure rate of everything but keyboards seemed to be greater.) Now let me reject the premise. Correct me if I'm wrong (honestly, please do) but you seem to be implying that the contractor will make money only if the customer 'loses' it. What you are overlooking is that the contractor may be able to provide the service cheaper than the customer is able to do it. So while you as the customer may be able to perform the same service (what ever it is) and even easily afford the cost of not using a contractor, if the service organization can do the repair at a lower price than your internal costs while still making a profit, everybody makes out. But sadly our world is iffier than most. That is the rub and I'll agree with you that the quality of many stand alone PC service companies merits a poor rating. Overall, our view of them is probably similar. I exempt the larger box manufacturers from the dreary evaluation. My original comment was in reaction to a 90 day warranty. I think that this is a gimmick used to squeeze a few bucks off the system price. A business user would be better off by expecting at least one year coverage, in my opinion. Regards, Michael