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March 2003: Paul Smith - Component cowboy
Howdy (Business) Partners. This month I’d like to start with a roundup of PC build bits*.
First off 8x AGP cards are now available, offering gamers the ultimate in polished pixel performance. Another recent innovation is Serial-ATA hard drives. Many boards have supported these for months, but at last the drives themselves are shipping. Also look out for 10k RPM IDE drives from WD. Essentially SCSI drives with a S-ATA interface, they’re available in SCSI capacities (36/73/etc.Gb) at about 70% of the SCSI price and they carry the same 5 year warrantee. On the subject of drive warrantees, even though IBM HDDs are no more, the Hitachi brand that took them over still features a full three years. Post-Christmas stock dumping has seen 48x24x48 speed CDRWs falling as low as £26 for an LG drive, which makes you speculate why anyone buys CD-ROM drives. A Toshiba DVD-R drive will set you back less than £130 and should be sub £100 by the end of the summer. At that price it’s an option you should be listing! The recent price drop on Intel CPUs sounds the death knell for 400Mhz FSB boards and chips, with the smart money moving up to the 533Mhz models.
Advice spot.
Given that visitors to your shop are dressed of the bracing weather outside, don’t over-heat your sales area. In a recent visit to a local indie I was driven back outside in moments by the hot, dry, airless atmosphere. While I usually like a warm welcome, I’m not a cacti. Never forgot a comfortable customer is a spending customer.
Three wheels on my wagon.
Before I abandoned myself to the rocky prairie of I.T, I worked in auto-parts retail. There are a lot of parallels between this industry and our own. The High Street is dominated by one name - in this case Halfords - and there’s a very well established network of independents, from the grotty tumbleweedy flea-blown to civilised smultiples. Now, these shops are facing a problem that also reflects on the IT business. As cars have become more complex, and users less enthusiastic about getting their hands dirty, the demand for service components has fallen. Add the fact that very few new cars come without a decent stereo or a beverage holder, and you can see why these shops are having to focus on the more outlandish after-market goodies, like Simpsons air fresheners, bucket seats, flashy alloys and those pointlessly illuminated windscreen washer jets. In the same way, the more systems that are sold with the add-on of a decent sized monitor, a printer, a scanner and a suite of business software, the less opportunities there are to sell these items at a later date. The thing to take from this is that you should make every effort to sell peripherals at the system-flogging stage, and be thankful you’ve not got a dozen dusty beaded-seat-covers out the back.
*Prices correct as of 17/02/03 from a major UK distie. Thanks to Dan Reeves for his help.
Paul ‘saddle-sore’ Smith (& Wesson) still seeks employment Nirvana. Please e-mail him at info@snapsandbytes.co.uk with your succulent offers.
501 words of wilderness wisdom Dale. Yeehaa!