What is the single most important piece of equipment used in your business?  In your home?

Your computer!  If it’s not at the very peak of the list it is certainly near the top.

So why do so many people want to spend as absolutely little money as possible on what is arguably one of the most important pieces of equipment that you use?

The adage is ‘pay now or pay later’, and nothing could be truer when it comes to your computer.

Sure, you can find a computer at Fry’s or one of the other big-box stores for $300 but ask yourself, ‘why is it only $300?’

In a nutshell, you get what you pay for.  The reason those systems are cheap is because they use cheap parts internally.  It may look good on paper – 4GB of RAM, 750GB hard drive, etc., but if you could see what we’ve seen – the frustration, the tears and the anger from folks who have purchased one of those ‘bargain’ computers only to have it fail after a matter of seconds (never boots up out of the box), minutes, hours or months you would want to stay very far away from these ‘bargain’ systems.

Computers are fairly simple devices – they consist of just a few main parts – case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, DVD/optical drive and maybe a video card.  The cheap systems use cheap parts.  A cheap power supply can (and will) fail, potentially taking out the entire system with it.  A cheap motherboard will fail and when it goes the whole system is gone.  These are the two most common failures we see in the ‘bargain’ systems.

You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars for a good system, but to date we’ve yet to find a quality business class desktop system for under $600.  Generally speaking most business class systems (systems designed to be used daily, all day) will run in the $700 to $1,000 range.  Those systems will contain quality parts, designed to last.

If you are in the market for a new desktop computer we would love to show you our *quality* desktop computers. We have models ranging from a solid home system for $650 to a business system with a SSD (think jaw-dropping fast) hard drive for $999.  More information can be found at this blog post, and our main website’s products page.

We’ll leave you with one example of what happened to one of our clients.

We got called out to a business client who had purchased two new computers and both of these brand new computers were running slower than their 5-year old systems.

We found that while the systems (desktops) looked normal on the outside, what we found on the inside blew our minds.

These systems were both made by a major name-brand – one of the top three in the market.  What they had done was use a full-size desktop case, but instead of putting in a regular motherboard, processor and RAM they had used a Netbook motherboard, processor and RAM.  A Netbook is a $200 sub-notebook with very limited power and memory.

What our client had was basically a netbook computer running in a desktop case.  The system was nowhere near powerful enough to run their business applications.  The client got a great deal on the systems (he thought) at $350 each, but he basically spent $700 and ended up having to purchase two more *real* computers.

Remember, pay now, or pay later.

We welcome any feedback, and as always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to give us a shout!

Web www.scurlocksystems.com and www.ssaremote.com

Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC

866.665.1750 | 972.633.1111

Scurlock Systems is located in Plano, Texas and provides both remote computer service and computer repair in Plano, Dallas, Richardson, Allen and surrounding areas.