[ale] OT vision computers etal

[Nathan]

Again, if there's money in the budget, I encourage clients to 1) buy 
good equipment (i.e. homebrew, whitebox, whatever) and 2) find someone 
locally to support it when things go down.  If they're looking for that 
one stop (read price) solution though, the bigger shops (like Dell) are 
difficult to compete with.  Adding $299 (or whatever the going rate is) 
for 'Gold' or 'Premium' or whatever the word for the day for 'good 
English Speaking', competent technical support and next business day or 
4 hour on-site service is hard to beat.


Geoffrey wrote:
> Nathan wrote:
>   
>> I think that the key thing here is 'anybody with the know-how'.  Don't 
>> get me wrong, I would much rather build a computer from 'off the street' 
>> components and then get the $$ to support it if something goes wrong, 
>> but it sounds like the client is looking for 1) a one stop shop and 2) a 
>> one time payment (with 'free' support over the 3 year life of the 
>> equipment).  Vision offers that and Dell offers that.  I don't know of 
>> many small Mom and Pop shops that can afford to sell a computer (with 
>> Windows) for $499 and then provide 24 hour phone support for small 
>> problems and then free, next day (or 4 hour, if you wanna pay the extra 
>> $$ to Dell) support, including replacement if necessary, on site for 3 
>> years after the sale.  Another factor here is that, most of the time, 
>> the issues aren't going to be hardware related.  I spend much more time 
>> removing virii, spyware, aware, undorking a profile, etc. than I do 
>> swapping RAM, hard drives or motherboards (which covers pretty much 
>> everything else since most OEM mobos have everything integrated into the 
>> mobo) at most Windows client sites.
>>     
>
> My personal experience with Dell is there support is virtually 
> non-existent.  They've sent it over seas as well and you get nothing but 
> a script reading bot on the other end.  The smaller you are, the worse 
> it gets.  Big customers get priority.
>
> I don't know about Vision's service, but I don't think you're going to 
> get a computer for the same price as you would from Dell.
>
>