Brands are Good

It's easier for everyone

Why do we do this? Simple, if things go wrong, the customer will usually have plenty of phone numbers to call for support, and we can also offer support to our customers because our vendors support us. That explains how we are able to efficiently organize and carry out our "maintenance contracts." (long-term contracts where we handle the outsourced repair work for a client). Without the backing of the distributors such as Infotel, Merisel and @Once among others, we wouldn't be able to effectively manage these support accounts, because we would not have a reliable source of information and quality components.

Does it make us cost more? Yes. Do our current customers mind-paying extra for that peace of mind? The ones that want price, not service, don't start an account with us. Some you win, some you lose. You can't make everyone happy.

What's in a Name?

Brand name products do cost more, but the manufacturers provide tons of support routes and information for supporting the end user. That's a part of the price that you pay for retail box from a retail store. Lately, there has been a lot of talk about "White Box" products. Usually you will find small retailers and trade show vendors, as well as the online reseller, dealing in a large amount of these types of products.

The trick here is that you might not always get what you think you are getting. Everyone knows that the basic difference between retail box and white box brand name equipment is mainly the packaged documentation and software. All you usually get in the white box is the driver disk and a small instruction paper -that's it.

Sometimes however, the difference may go deeper than simply the packaging and documentation. Some white boxes might be OEM overspill, some might be reworked components (devices that were found defective and are repaired by a special line that will work around the defect).

For other parts still, there may be a critical difference between the OEM and retail version. Possibly, the OEM/white box parts might have slower memory, or cheaper parts. There is really no way to tell outside of word of mouth really. The situation becomes even more complicated for an inexperienced user that does not know how to tell the difference either. To him/her, you can lay both cards down side by side and they would see two of the exact same thing. A person with a trained eye would likely catch on fairly quick if one Video card has 5ns RAM and the other has 6ns RAM.