Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Bowmont
Yeah building PCs isn't too hard but you can make some decent extra cash if you can find people willing to let you build them nice computers with 'custom' (aka not that crap from Dell) cases.
|
I wasn't planning on making money doing it. There are a lot of unforeseeable circumstances that could go wrong that I probably wouldn't be prepared to deal with if I did that as a business. Naturally I'd have to offer some sort of guarantee, and PC parts don't always work, then you have to RMA them and that process could take weeks if you have to mail it to the manufacturer. Its not exactly something I'd like to deal with. I'll do it for me, but I wouldn't want that responsibility multiplied by potentially dozens or more. If I do something like that I'm going to be 100% prepared to deal with any situation that could be thrown at me and go about doing it correctly, or I simply won't do it at all.
Ram seems to have a reasonably high failure rate compared to a lot of other parts, and its not uncommon at all to get sent a bad stick of ram from newegg, and it can be a pain in the ass to troubleshoot. You're lucky if the bad ram stick keeps your PC from booting, then its just a process of elimination, but its not always that easy. They have machines that can test ram more accurately and efficiently, but they're relatively expensive. Any PC shop worth their salt has one though.
Those are just problems a DYI person has to deal with when building PCs, is that its much more likely you will get a part that is DOA. Then you gotta figure out which part is bad. I had 1 bad stick of ram, and also my PSU didn't have enough volts on the 12v rail. It was on the low side, so I had to RMA that too. Assembly is very easy, troubleshooting bad parts is a pain in the ass.
I've built 2 PCs, and both times I did it, I got parts that were DOA. So, either I'm the unluckiest SOB in the world, or my experience is sorta typical. The PC I helped a friend of mine build had a bad motherboard. Bent pins inside of the CPU socket. They were bent to total hell, like whatever Chinaman was working QC that day must have forgot his glasses. Asrock we're actually assholes to deal with about it too, because they insinuated that I must have damaged it. But its absolutely impossible I could have damaged it as all I did was pop the cover off the socket. They ended up sending me a new one, but it arrived about a month later. If that is typical of what I'd have to deal with on a consistent basis, then there there is no damn way I'd do this for a living. I mean, what the hell am I gonna tell a customer if they give me a bad motherboard, then wait 3-4 weeks for the new one, just to find out I got a bad stick of ram too, and then another 3-4 weeks to get that shipped? Definitely not a position I want to be in.