Daniel Murton

Over the week or so I’ll be going over different categories like printers, tablets, laptops, and TV’s. I’ll give you advice and tell you how sales people will try to sell you more than you need. As a old District Manager told us get all the money on table when you sell.

Laptops and Desktops: My first suggestion when buying a laptop or computer is not to buy the cheapest or the most expensive. When you’re buying it make sure to look at the CPU and Video Card because these parts are really hard to upgrade. Memory and Hard Drives are a lot easier. When you buying it make sure to have the unit play high def youtube clips or a full feature website so that you see how it handles it. You don’t want to take it home and find out its not adequate.

Here is how the salesperson will try to Scroodge you. 

1.    Setup:

This is the biggest area Salespeople will try to rip you off. Over the course of the purchase their going to undermine your confidence in computers so they can suggest that they set it up for you. This will cost anywhere from $99 to $300 if it includes anti-virus and office productivity suite. What does a setup include? Them turning it on, setting up the name and account, turning on updates, (which is automatic) they may uninstall some icons and install software requested and lastly they may import your email or create recovery discs. These last two are the hardest but not insurmountable. For data transferring you can buy $50 dollar cable for windows machines that will do everything and creating discs is all about setting time aside in the beginning to make them.  WARNING: if you’re buying a unit make sure it’s sealed because a lot of time they pre setup machines and then try to force the setup or disc creation fees on you. If you buy the open unit, make sure you do not pay for the setup and ask the manager for the corporate policy on forcing services on customers and ask for head office contact info to confirm their policy. If they still try to charge you for a setup that you don’t want take the contact info and walk; I mean run away.

2.  Screen Cleaner, Wireless Mouse, USB, Etc

Salespeople love to load you up with random accessories that you may need but ultimately I rather buy over time as I need it. If you must; always ask for a deal or buy something on sale. This is their time to wheel and deal so it should be your time too.

3. Warranty

As a consumer your consuming content and technology and you can plan on it lasting for about three years. After that things will fail or become obsolete The biggest part that fails is the battery which usually has about 500 charges in it before it starts to degrade so if you want to keep your unit for 5 years then get the warranty just remember you’ll be forking out close to 20 percent more of the purchase price to the company’s bottom line.

Last bit of advice make sure you get a new unit. I’ve seen returned units get sold and returned multiple times until some sad sack buys it without them knowing the history. This is very easy for stores to pull off because they can claim the units were pre setup for your convenience when in fact it’s the stores lemon.