Canadians...DO NOT SHOP THERE!!

[Spider]

I miss living in San Jose.

I'm Canadian and I lived in San Jose until the dot.bomb reached us
in 1998. I was going into Fry's comp store religiously every other day.
Really disliked Saturdays cause of the parking probs but made it
in there eventually.

In Canada west coast we have no store the size of Fry's. Our big
comp retailer is a chain of stores called Future Shop. Future Shop
has no where near the amount of stock that Fry's has but it is
the largest none-the-less.

I buy about 3 to 6 computers a month and have been getting
most of them from Future Shop pre-built. They have there own
brand Cicero and for most clients I find these towers
to be of fair quality and the best part was they are inexpensive.
Especially if you just want the tower and nothing else.

I'd pay say $650.00CDN for a tower with a one year old Pentium
chip, CD-RW, big-gig hard drive, decent graphics card, and I
could always get them to throw in junk like speakers, 128Mb
RAM module, software, O/S CD and serial#, ether card.
It would literally take three of us to carry all the stuff out to
the parking lot.

I was in a Future Shop Dec.26.2002 and it was a nightmare.
Elbow to elbow people and everybody was walking out with
comps, T.V.'s, cell phones, DVDs etc. I decided to leave
and go back after Jan.1.2003 cause it was just ridiculous
to try and walk around in there.

I went in there yesterday to purchase the comp I wanted to get
on Dec.26.2002 and to my surprise the whole pricing scheme
has changed in the comp department there. The sales person
walks me over to a Cicero tower
2.0GHz Pentium
128MB SDRAM
20Gb HD
Onboard Video
CD-ROM
$999.00!!!!
Sales person says no free goo with it either!!!
I start yammering at the sales person
"the stuff in that machine is YEARS old...SDRAM???
you want a thousand dollars for an old computer?
what the blazes happened to Future Shop and their
good prices on Cicero towers?"
He doesn't have an answer except for he tries to start
talking about SDRAM is not old and it's an up-2-date
machine and other malarkey.

Unfortunately I had the clients there (have to have their
money I never use mine unless I'm under contract). The
poor devils drove two hours to get to the city where I
am at the moment. I asked the sales person to let me
use a Web access comp and I go to dell.com and
custom order a
2.0GHz Pentium
60Gb 7200 HD
128Mb DDR RAM
keyboard
17" monitor
mouse
one year warranty
WindowsXP Home
WordPerfect software package
32MB ATI Rage Ultra 4X AGP Graphics Card
48X CD-ROM
Harmon/Kardon 206 Speakers
integrated ether
for $1048.00CDN

The comp is being delivered to the clients house. They now have
a full system ready to go with monitor keyboard, mouse etc.
unlike the Future Shop deal that was just a tower.

I now am going to be buying strictly from Dell and will only
seek the occasional peripheral here and there elsewhere.
It's back to London Drugs (they sell comp stuff and have
better prices than Future Shop) for all the other comp things.

Future Shop is loaded to the gills with ready-to-go Hewlett Packard,
Gateway, and other poor quality comps. They have outrageous
prices on those low quality made-to-annoy brand names.
People are walking out of there spending $3000.00 on a
Hewlett Packard computer!!!

I warn all Canadians to beware of the waste of money shopping
there. Get online and have a high quality machine dropped off
to your door...GO DELL.

[wllwnn]

Future Shop has always sucked. The only thing i ever bought from them is a bottle of pop! The DVDs i got from them didn't even work and they wouldn't exchange it!

If you want computers go to for: Cheap-Costco (mine anyways)
(Quality-Compusmart(Being rich helps here )Crap-get a Compaq London Drugs has good computer surpisingly! Like there s ACCTUALLY are useful and of good value.


DUDE YOUR GETTING A DELL!!

[Alfons]

Around Toronto I can get an AMD 1800+ with everything necessary to run (except the display) for CDN$440. I only buy from Future Shop things that are on sale cheaper than anywhere else, which is very little.