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The weakest guarantee you should settle for should include:
- 72-hour burn-in to avoid that sudden infant death syndrome. (Also,
try to find out if they do a power-cycling test and how many repeats
they do; this stresses the hardware much more than steady burn-in.)
- 30 day money-back guarantee. Watch out for fine print that weakens this
with a restocking fee or limits it with exclusions.
- 1 year parts and labor guarantee (some vendors give 2 years).
- 1 year of 800 number tech support (many vendors give lifetime support).
Additionally, many vendors offer a year of on-site service free. You should
find out who they contract the service to. Also be sure the free service
coverage area includes your site; some unscrupulous vendors weasel their way
out with "some locations pay extra", which translates roughly as "through the
nose if you're further away than our parking lot".
If you're buying from a dealership or superstore, find out what
they'll guarantee beyond the above. If the answer is "nothing", go
somewhere else.
Ask your potential suppliers what kind and volume of documentation
they supply with your hardware. You should get, at minimum,
operations manuals for the motherboard and each card or peripheral.
Skimpiness in this area is a valuable clue that they may be using
no-name parts from Upper Baluchistan, which is not necessarily a red
flag in itself but should prompt you to ask more questions.
There are various cost-cutting tactics a vendor can use which bring down the
system's overall quality. Here are some good questions to ask:
- Is the memory zero-wait-state? One or more wait states allows the
vendor to use slower and cheaper memory but will slow down your actual
memory subsystem throughput. This is a particularly important
question for the cache memory!
- If you're buying a factory-configured system, does it have FCC
certification? While it's not necessarily the case that a
non-certified system is going to spew a lot of radio-frequency
interference, certification is legally required --- and becoming more
important as clock frequencies climb. Lack of that FCC sticker may
indicate a fly-by-night vendor, or at least one in danger of being
raided and shut down!
- Are the internal cable connectors keyed, so they can't be put in
upside down? This doesn't matter if you'll never, ever ever
need to upgrade or service your system. Otherwise, it's pretty
important; and vendors who fluff this detail may be quietly cutting
other corners.
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