Hi all, This is a pretty lengthy post so skip over it if you have no interest in PC Parts Xpress, a local computer store.
Over the months there as been some references to PC Parts Xpress here i.e., our business plan / primary market, the technical expertise of its employees, and the inventory we stock. So I thought I'd clarify this for those interested. First of all, as others pointed out, we are not related to the defunct Computer XP formerly Edge Micro formerly Computer Xpress nor have we ever been. Many of you may not have heard of us as we do not advertise other than a reader board sign, our website, and word of mouth (keeps overhead lower). This month marks our store's 4 year anniversary. Two of the three sales people have been with us since we've opened. We own our location, a converted older smaller house, so we don't quite have the overhead others in nicer places have, which ultimately translates into better pricing. We our very competitive in just about everything needed to assemble a system. The market we serve is primarily the Eugene / Springfield area and specifically hobbyist that want to assemble their own systems, other builders (including a couple of small computer stores), non-computer related businesses that assemble their own systems, and, people referred who are looking to purchase an assembled system as they're not hobbyists and do not want to assemble their own system. Our collective linux experience is next to nil; I having only once installed it and do not even recall which flavor of linux as it was over 4 years ago. It did have a GUI which reminded me of Win95. The process was a fairly straight forward and since I didn't really have any need for it at the time I didn't do anything further with it. Another employee here is attempting to host his own web server using Apache and a cable modem while the other two have no experience with linux at all. This is one area I wish I did have more expertise in as many a business could benefit from having their own web server, including ours. Years ago linux had more hardware compatibility issues however that is not the case anymore (unless building something specialized like a DAW or Video Editing system). As other posts have already pointed out Linux installs on just about anything including much of the low-end junk. I agree with certain posts here that in regards to linux we are as a whole pretty much clueless. However our sales people are fairly knowledgeable in the hardware we carry and its features. And if we don't know something, all our demo systems have a cable connection to look up what's needed. Over the years we've built close to 500 systems and have upgraded or repaired thousands more, from 486 systems (years ago) to PIV 3Ghz systems. Many of our customers are repeat customers, from when I had a home based operation prior to 2000, on their 3rd or 4th new system purchase. Its not realistic to expect sales employees to have much technical knowledge otherwise they'd be working elsewhere making more money, unless of course the business is a one man operation which ours isn't. Our sales people get hammered with support questions from people just stopping in or calling as its free info. The sales people do the best they can and may give out answers contrary to what some here think are appropriate but they do try to be helpful and friendly. Tech support is the bane of the industry and the local computer shop is a quick and easy method of attempting to get free answers to ones problems; which is expected to a point. Similarly sales employees of Home Depot for the most part are not contractors though they attempt to answer those types of questions all day long. Professionals in other fields i.e. doctors, attorneys, accountants, don't answer any questions as they have a receptionist shielding them. Our sales people do know much more than your average big box computer salesperson and they do actually have a personal interest in computers (albeit primarily high-end gaming for two of them which is helpful for the gaming crowd). My level of geekness is geared toward researching the right product mix, increasing my tech skills, audio / video editing, web design / hosting, and using computers to automate our business. We may be the most automated independent retail computer store locally, i.e. automated Point of Sale (POS), integrated website, computerized internet security monitoring and hopefully in a few months we'll have an online customizable quoting system for new system builds. The POS system allows us to bar code prices on all of our inventory, generate sales receipts, keep records of customer purchases (if they wanted), and maintain stock levels using automated purchase orders. Also we have integrated our Point of Sale database with our website, and as was mentioned by an earlier post, we list our entire inventory on our website along with prices and quantities which is updated every 20 minutes throughout the day. There is no guesswork or haggling over our prices, what is posted is what we sell it for. We carry everything from low-end generic items to name brand quality items as there are customers for every price point. Very seldom do customers actually need to wait for an item to be ordered that we normally carry as we usually have it in stock or will be in stock the next day. On name brands we carry products from Intel, Asus, MSI, Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Antec, Thermal Take, Sparkle, Viewsonic, NEC, Creative, MSI, Samsung, Infineon, Teac, Mitsumi, Pioneer, Logitech, Microsoft and 3Com / USRobotics. On lower priced items we carry ECS, PC Chips, Daytona, Evga, Jaton, Cnet, generic sound cards, cases, speakers, memory, keyboards / mice. Everything we sell has a 30 day exchange and for up to 6 months from the date of purchase we will handle returns to the distributor for most parts purchases for a small fee to cover shipping. Granted we have a small location but we squeeze a lot of product into it. This was a fairly long-winded message that I hope you who are still reading found useful. Check us out on the web first and stop on by if you see something you like. Btw - for this list server is there a way to just read and reply to messages on the website without receive e-mails? I'd much prefer that method as I get inundated with e-mails all over. Also, for the person who needed a solution for browsing on the web for a local library, it is possible to run certain applications from a CD in an XP environment (similar to Knoppix). I have one that I made up that allows me to surf the web without a hard drive installed though I primarily use it for diagnostics. This may be too slow if the computers are older systems. Since it isn't a linux based solution e-mail me offline if you would like to know more about it. Patrick Ewing PC Parts Xpress 741-0104 www.pcpartsxpress.com _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
