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Computer Hardware PurchasingThailandGuru.com > Computer consulting > Computer hardware purchasingIf your office is very dependent upon computers for productivity, then you'd better understand this section! All computers are not alike. The CPU is just one chip in the computer. No matter what the brand, you have many components of different manufacturers of varying quality -- mainboards, video cards, monitors, hard disks, CD-ROMs, network cards, etc. Computers are extremely sophisticated devices, and the field is changing rapidly. Bugs and defects are common, including major name brands. We build our own computers. Alternatively, we also offer to do Quality Assurance on third party vendors, can recommend a quality vendor, and can write up specifications for that vendor, particularly the brand names and models of particular parts to go into your systems as there may be no one vendor which carries what you need but doesn't cut a corner somewhere on what they carry but can source and resell better components if they exist in Thailand. If you buy a major name brand, then you will usually pay a lot more money and get "lowest common denominator" parts inside. Rich companies who don't know computers buy this kind. They usually work fine, but they are usually proprietary computers that are difficult to upgrade (if it can be), you are forced to give repeat business to the vendor for the proprietary upgrades, and the upgrades are more expensive. Purchasing computer hardware in Thailand is not the same as purchasing it in a major western country. If you compare the selection of an Internet on-line mail order operation in the U.S. with what's available in Thailand, you will find the following problems:
In addition to the above obvious problems, you also have the following hardware issues:
Some of the service problems you run into:
Vendors will take risks, with the simple assurance that if there are any problems, no problem, just bring the computer back and they will fix it under warranty. Sure, no sweat off their back. They aren't giving you warranty on YOUR site, you have to haul the computer back to their shop. Sometimes over and over. Consider the costs to you:
We usually offer a fixed, lump sum fee, not hourly. When we supply computers, the warranty is on YOUR site. You can be sure we do our best to do it right the first time. We don't take chances on cheap parts in order to save a few hundred baht here and there. We choose parts carefully, and test things thoroughly. If it fails at your site, it's sweat off OUR backs, in contrast to warranty at the shop that may try several cheaper components and let you do the "testing" by just using it at your office. Keep in mind that in Thailand, you don't get your money back if a product doesn't work well. Standard practice is that you can exchange it for another product in stock of equal value, if you can find such a thing in their store. But no refunds of money. Keep your receipts to establish what you paid for the product. However, what determines warranty is the sticker on the item which has the vendor's name on it and a date with the year and month of the sale checkmarked. Often, there are two stickers, one for the vendor and one for the distributor, with the distributor's having the year and month marks checked. A 1 year warranty may actually be slightly less or more than a year if there are two stickers and they go by the distributor's sticker date instead of the actual sale date, though you can argue this with the vendor. However, it's quite unlikely the part would fail close to the end of warranty. When you have a bad part, it can consume a lot of time and money to determine what particular part is faulty and to get it replaced. If you have a computer consultant on an hourly rate rather than a lump sum rate, then you can spend vast sums on consulting. If your consultant is a Thai who respects authorities who are at fault, then you may not get all your problems ironed out correctly in the end. You cannot take all error messages literally. When hardware and software products are made, programmers don't put a lot of effort into accurate error handling. For example, you may have a RAM memory problem, but you get error messages saying that your software performed an illegal operation, or there was an error reading your file from your hard disk, or a Windows module is corrupted, or something else. Good chance you won't get a message saying that there was an error in your RAM memory. You're getting reports of symptoms, not causes. You should not assume all tests you see are thorough. For example, when your computer computer starts up, you will see that it quickly checks its memory, but the memory may not be stable. Your computer programs crash later.
Outright ScamsRemarked ChipsThailand is well known for its faked name brands. This goes to computers, too. Because most Thais have never been overseas, they usually don't know the difference. We do. Memory chips of a reputable brand will go for a higher price than chips of a cheap brand. In Thailand, it is common for a distributor to "remark" the chips by removing the cheap brand and printing a reputable brand onto them. Not all brands have the same quality control or quality of technology in this technically competitive world. Unfortunately, too many distributors and vendors in Thailand buy and sell memory chips based on price and not technical analysis, as if they're all the same. Worse yet, they'll remark the brand from cheap to reputable name. Another trick is remarking their speed rating, too. Chips with a high speed rating will cost more than chips with a low speed rating. Faster chips are used in faster computers, slower chips with slower CPUs. For certain reasons, some chips with a low speed rating will run OK at a speed above their rating, i.e., in faster computers. Sometimes, the vendor can get away with this and the customer doesn't have any problems. However, often they will cause the computer to crash after awhile, as they aren't stable at that speed, and memory corruption creeps in. How do they test the chips? I've seen them. They have a series of test computers of different speeds. The worst chip dealers do the quickest test (sometimes with a big box of chips, testing them one or two at a time). They put the chips into the test computer, turn on the computer, and watch the computer do its quick memory check during bootup. If it passes that, they consider the chips OK, turn off the computer, remove the chips, put them into the fast box, put in the next chips to test. Some testers will let the computer boot into Windows 95 to see if Windows crashes, since Windows does its own error checking. With multiple computers running multiple speeds, they see how fast the chips will operate. In either case, this neglects the fact that many lower spec chips will be unstable and memory will get corrupted over time when run at high speed, e.g., when a secretary has been using the computer for 30 minutes. That's usually why the manufacturer rated the chips at low speed. (Why does this happen at all? Many chips with low ratings will truly run at a high speed without memory corruption over time. In fact, it is known that some manufacturers will themselves mark higher speed chips with lower speed ratings if they have recently converted their factories to make the latest generation high speed chips, but find that market demand for the higher speed chips hasn't caught up yet, and so they mark some chips for lower speed and sell to that market. But in the distributor market in Thailand, add in some wishful thinking and greed, and they will push all chips to the limit.) You don't have much choice in Thailand, anyway. In US mail order catalogs on the Internet, there is often a list of about ten major chip manufacturers to choose from, and countries of origin, e.g., Micron, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Okidata, Panasonic, IBM, Siemens, Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and IBM. There are other chip manufacturers that many people see as second rate. In Thailand, you can find all the second rate ones but of the abovelisted ones, you'll usually find only the marks of Hitachi on the "high end" (usually made in Malaysia). While Japan is a chip capital, in Thailand you won't find chips Made in Japan very often. Most common are the Korean brands LG (which I've had a lot of problems with for years, consistently) and Hyundai. The rest are rare, though chips marked IBM and Micron consistently turn up from time to time. Bad memory chips are the most common problem of all. But not the only problem. Rejected Parts "Recycled""Recycling" is whereby a distributor knowingly buys a large quantity of known-to-be-defective parts at a very low price, and his business is simply to get a better profit at the price of more service, usually with cheap employees, and not caring about all the time, energy and money lost by the end users in dealing with the problems due to the dumped parts. The original manufacturer allows these parts out either because they spent a large sum of money on manufacturing them before they found out they're defective and don't want to take the loss, or else an employee steals parts from the rejects pile instead of disposing of or destroying them. It can be mainboards, LAN cards, memory chips, anything. For example, let's say there is a batch of 100 memory chip modules. The distributor sells all 100. About 60 are returned by customers or resellers who report them as bad. No problem, the distributor exchanges them for good memory and emphasizes his "good service". Then he puts these 60 back on the shelf or into another vendor's order. Eventually these 60 are all sold. Maybe 40 come back. Repeat the cycle. Eventually all of the memory is absorbed in the market. It gets absorbed simply because some of it gets set aside in sloppy resellers inventories or with corporate customers who put up with computer crashes or otherwise don't get the memory back for a return. The users may know they have a problem but not know it's the memory chips. They may be shy to go back and say they think the chips are bad when they aren't sure. For whatever reason, the consumer loses while the vendors make money. All these vendors care about is making money. You can usually identify recycled parts, because they have one or more of the following: the chips have a sticker on them rather than the manufacturer's name printed on it (in the case of rejected parts, since some manufacturers don't print their name on a product until it has passed a quality check), or the manufacturer's logo looks faked, or there is no warranty date expiration sticker (since it may get obviously out of date with recycling). In some sophisticated scam networks, distributors will mark poor quality memory chips with a manufacturer's name other than any of the ones they normally carry so that they don't impart a bad reputation to their usual line. When the original equipment manufacturer is guilty of recycling, they will usually send the defective batch of parts to a country like Thailand, because they're unlikely to get any fallout in the computer trade media that usually originates in the U.S. and other English speaking countries, and Thailand is a small market with a user base that's more likely to absorb these parts due to usually low expertise and low standards of quality. Putting This Into The Big PictureThis is not to say that all or most parts are bad quality. The problems of quality tend to occur in certain components which go inside the computer and which are handled by systems integrators. Ironically, the targetted suckers are usually the people who should know better -- the system integrators. The fundamental problems are that systems integrators have never had exposure to western standards of quality; and/or are trying to maximize their own profits by using cheap parts (whereby a little bit of difference in money to a westerner is a LOT of money by their standards); and/or if they are salaried by their company then they are respecting the wishes of the purchasing authority within their company to use these parts whereby the purchasing authority is trying to maximize the amount of money they make by using the cheapest parts.
See also:
For computer consulting, contact Mark Prado at XX-XXX-XXXX (confidential, please contact us for our mobile number)
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