Buy the Best

For someone who spends very little (relatively speaking) on his technology, this sounds kind of crazy doesn't it? Here's the issue: when you buy used (most of the time), you can't afford to buy "cheap". There's a huge difference between "inexpensive" and "cheap". It's my philosophy that one of the major problems with modern American society is the "Walmart-ization" of the consumer model, which is not to say that there's anything wrong with shopping at Walmart per se, but that we've come to "buy into" buying cheap and new. This unfortunately leads us into buying "more" (since it breaks and can't be fix economically) vs. better quality. Of course, we aren't the only nation in the world guilty of this as Target (Dayton-Hudson/French) and Ikea (Swedish) are more than willing to participate in this business model as well!

......but enough with the soap-box! Today, I'm here to talk about buying quality at a great price. As most folks are well aware, if you really want to take it to an extreme, you can always buy a Mercedes and keep it for 20-25 years and 500,000 miles plus. However, this blog is about about the typical consumer electronics and office type products we use daily and buy regularly so I'll concentrate on those and discuss why I buy what I do.

What started this started this whole thought process was, of all things, some bad RAM! Of course, buying this sort of thing on eBay is a risky proposition to start with, but there are benefits to this type of risk-taking. One of the areas that I don't compromise is the RAM that I use in my personal machines. I tend to use Mushkin as much as I can. Mushkin is a small outfit out of the Denver area that originally made their name by making upgrade memory for Macs. Their high-end (it's all high-end, just a matter of degrees) stuff is considered ultra-reliable and stable. I've been using it for a number of years now and have never been disappointed. However, it tends to be pricey, even used. So I bought some a month or so ago to upgrade my desktop to 8Gb and for my XP box build-up. Both sets came in with problems! I contacted them and after some tech support to try a couple of things it was determined that what I already knew....they were bad. So I was given the RMA and shipped them off to their Pfugerville, Texas support facility. Less than a week later, I got back a replacement (4Gb) pair for the "Blackline" RAM, but since the "Silverline" (1Gb) pair has been long-since out of production, they sent me 2 (4Gb) pairs of their current model for that spec! That's 8Gb vs. the 2Gb that I sent them! I'm currently running 12 sticks of their RAM and 2 SSDs in my machines. You think they might very well have kept this customer for a while longer!?!

While on the subject of Macs (at least peripherally), I've always had people ask me why I don't use them. And the fact of the matter is that they are outstanding products (other than that accursed touchpad of course)! Everything they produce from computers, to iPods, to the iPad have excellent design, outstanding engineering and generally top-notch build quality. So, what's the issue? The fact is that they just don't sell enough of them to drive the the price to a level I'm willing to pay on the used market and given their fanatically fan-boy following, that keeps the price up even higher. However, some of their products are some dominant that they've become common in the used market and make great deals. We have a whole fleet of iPods of various types around the house and use them regularly. The "Classic" is such a great product for the price it's hard not buy them and use them for both music as well as portable storage. 

We'll start with the ThinkPads that we use in our house. Back when I started working in IT about 15 years ago, it was not a given that virtually all products would work relatively well, right out of the box. Those were the days when a basic desktop PC would run you $2000-2500 and laptops routinely cost $3000-3500+. Furthermore, if you made the mistake of buying a Packard-Bell, CTX or Acer, chances were good that it didn't work well and were very difficult if not impossible to update. Then as now, I wanted to have both a desktop and a laptop computer and certainly couldn't go out and just buy both. With the help of my brother, I built a clone 486 cpu based desktop and bought a used laptop. In those days, very few people owned laptops and they tended to be a little difficult to work with. Of course, I further exacerbated the issue, by getting an "ultra-portable" which commonly for that time, had very few features built in. I had fallen in love with the amazing design and engineering of the IBM ThinkPad 701c "Butterfly". They were already old and kind of obsolete at the time, but the one I found was still under warranty. So for the next year IBM ThinkPad product support patiently worked with me on everything from driver installation of various peripherals to reloading of operating systems and communications set up. In the process, I learned to work on computers and created a future career for myself in IT. Over the years, I learned that there was a huge difference not only in how companies built their products, but also supported them as well. As an example, I found the not only was IBM willing to work with me for hours on end to resolve a problem, they'd even do it when it involved connecting to someone else' product (like my Panasonic CD-ROM drive). Let's just say that not all companies behave this way. I could of course go on about this for hours, but lets get down to other specifics.

In my home theater, I have a number of products made by Onkyo. Many are branded Integra which is their premium line (like Lexus vs. Toyota), but made by Onkyo nevertheless. I once sold their products in a former life and found that they embodied what I would call a great "bang for the buck" product. They sold slightly above the Best Buy range, but rarely if ever failed and offered performance far superior to their modest (typically $500-1500) price-point. 
They are far less "known" by the general public than the more popular Japanese competitors such as Sony, Pioneer and Yamaha, but offer a more neutral sound and better cost-build quality ratio. My plan is to eventually move up to the level of good separate made my Rotel, but that's essentially the same story with a British accent. And of course it is a brand that isn't well-known by the general public either.

The line that makes up the core of my other main hobby (photography via digital SLRs) is the exact opposite. There is probably no other company that has the brand recognition in photography quite like Nikon. Yes, I'm aware that there's higher pedigree (among cogniscenti) like Leica or Zeiss, but I'm discussing the general population here and certainly not "nose-bleed" prices either! My main draw to Nikon isn't so much the brand as it is the consistent commitment to quality and non-obsolescence. To one degree or another, the same could be said of Canon, Pentax or even Sony (Konica-Minolta), but I'm happy with my choice. There are simply an unbelievable number of lenses out there that will fit the mount going back to the 1960s.  And because they've been an industry leader for so long, there's a wide variety of models that have been produced and now occupy price-points ranging from $150-200 all the way up into the thousands on the used market. And of course the other half of the equation is that their quality is such that purchasing a used Nikon DSLR isn't a risky proposition. The buyer can generally expect it to last somewhere around 100,000 shutter actuations or more. The typical buyer of these cameras new, usually put on less than a quarter of that number before they upgrade. Great for frugal buyers everywhere!

My last example today was the subject of the last post; my new office chair...the Aeron by Herman Miller. Here's what happened to lead to this acquisition. I was actually VERY happy with a chair that was left to me by a previous co-worker when he left. It was a simple, but decent chair with nylon mesh upholstery vs. the more typical cloth. I tend to get hot sitting and wanted something that would breath, so I was pretty excited to have it! However, as it aged, the foam started to wear out and lose the support it used to have. Plus, one of the things common to inexpensive office chairs is the they tend to just simple bolt to the base, meaning that there is something like 1/4" or so of the actual bolts that extends into the seat. That's all fine of good when the chair/foam was new, but cheap padding tends to loose it's support quickly and now I easily feel the ends of those bolt poking me in the nether regions any time I'm in it for more than about 10 minutes! So, I've been on the lookout for a replacement. As I said in the previous post, I thought I found it in another Herman Miller chair that I fixed up, but it went to my wife with the bad back. This of course set the stage last month for my eBay find of the year; the $135 Aeron chair in Amarillo. 

And this perfectly highlights my point in this post. Generally, you can get away with picking up a used product and get satisfyingly good results from it if it was an excellent well-built product to start with.....however, this is almost never the case with "cheap" poorly-made products from the beginning. All manufactured product are designed and constructed to a useable lifespan. Cheap products have a relatively short one, even for non-professional use, but well-built products often wear like iron long after the other has broken. Furthermore, the better products are often made to be repaired and can be at a fairly low price for the part, plus a little labor. A perfect example is the Aeron chair I bought with a gas cylinder needed replacement. It's a $35 part and 20 minute project, but there's not a good way to fix the padding on my "pain-in-the-A**" cheapo office chair it replaced!

It's Summer!

Well; it's not actually not quite summer yet, but it's close enough. Close enough for a Frugal Propellerhead to plan for the summer. For a teacher, summer means quite a bit more time on our hands to do what we want, and of course for me, that would mean working on all things having to do with computers, home audio AND photography. Unfortunately that can also mean spending money, lots of it and that's something that can't happen. So a satisfying Propellerhead summer takes a little planning.

First of all, we need to take a look at what needs to be done, then we can talk about how to deal with that in planning. First of all, my daughter's custom lavender ThinkPad X30 is a little long-in-the-tooth. It specs out as a PIII (Tualatin) processor with 1Gb of RAM running XP! Although the size, and operating system is fine for her, the hardware is past due for an update. Fortunately, the X30 is built on the same chassis as the X31 which was a whole generation (if not more) forward in technology. It's built on the Pentium "M" (Banias) platform which completely skipped the hot running P4 series. Being built on the same chassis, I can simply move the lavender lid/screen assembly straight over. I will have to repaint a new keyboard bezel which was a different part, but that's not a big deal. Maxing the RAM out to a full 2Gb will have Katie all set for another couple of years! 

The trick here is that I didn't wait to buy it this summer when I have the time. Several months ago, I came across an ad for an X31 barebones-"base" (w/o LCD assembly) on the ThinkPad Forum for a song....so I bought it and stuck it in a cabinet.

 A few months ago I started seeing 128Gb, 1.8" SSDs selling for a very low price ($125). I was working on my "Ark" project at the time and bought one for it; then I started thinking about it and realized that I should probably pick up another one to upgrade my X300 since the load on it was getting a little old and would need a reload soon anyway. This second 128Gb SSD actually came in at just below $100 so into the cabinet it went as well. 

 Around that same time, the next generation of Sandforce SSD controllers came out and I ran across a special on the 128Gb Mushkin Chronos SSD for less than the price that I gave for the 60Gb Mushkin Callista SSD a little over a year ago. 

 The next project waiting in the wings is a Windows Home Server 2011 upgrade from the original WHS that I'm running now. I can't really claim good planning for this one, but rather it's the result of good fortune! I was having an email discussion with my brother last week about some projects that he's been working on and he described several machines that he's upgrading from the older Intel socket 775 line to the more current "Sandybridge" i3/i5/i7s. One of these project was a WHS 2011 machine, so I replied by telling him about the WHS file server that I cobbled together from free and traded-for parts. The upshot is that he offered to send me his left-over 775 boards, CPUs and misc parts! Although, the socket 775 may seem old to him, it's plenty new enough for me, and with a dual core processor on board, I'll be able to upgrade to the WHS 2011 as well since it's a 64-bit operating system. 


He also sent me a few other parts which have gone into upgrading the my XP computer, my regular workstation as well as the HTPC which will be receiving the 60Gb SSD that was in the workstation. So; things are lining up to be a busy summer ahead!