Not directly trading related, but I am sure some of you occasionally shop and need cables. I was in the market for a whole new home theater so a priced it out online at a reputable internet dealer then walked into a Best Buy to see how close they could come since I would rather buy locally for potential return and service problems. The first Best Buy basically blew me off and knocked off $500, then I went to another and - to my surprise - they actually matched the online price (a drop of $2k from list) and threw in delivery and some cables. It just goes to show that haggling and some leg work does pay off. I also needed some network and HDMI cables so I priced out 3 HDMI, 4 cat 6 network cables, and 1 crossover cable at local stores. The total price with tax was about $291. Then I priced out those same cables online at Monoprice and the total was $18.51 plus $7.82 shipping. That is not a misprint; it was $291 at the store and $26.33 total at Monoprice for the same thing. The lesson is don't ever buy your cables from a store.
I'm not at all surprised by the price difference in the cables. But I am hugely surprised that BestBuy was willing to compete with an online company. That is amazing.
I was surprised too, I guess I was buying enough stuff that they figured it was worth it. It was actually pretty funny because I just stopped in to see if they would do anything and had no intention of buying anything, especially since the first Best Buy wouldn't do much. When they told me they would match it, throw in delivery and a couple cables I figured what the heck. Just think how many people are out there paying $50, $75, or even $100 for a single HDMI cable when they can get the same thing for a couple dollars.
A little more hardware info: If you are looking for a higher end computer, say over $1500 for the box, you should look at other custom builders than Dell. I checked out Alienware, Puget, Maingear, Falcon Northwest, and AVA Direct. For the best balance of price and service I went with Maingear. The most expensive and probably best built is Falcon, and the lowest price but with a little less service and testing is AVA. You can also save money by not buying the extras like keyboard, mouse, MS Office, etc. from the builder since they mark everything up. You can get that stuff from newegg or tigerdirect for a lot cheaper.
The whole cable thing is one of the biggest scams going in the HT market. Radio Shack sells an 8 ft HDMI "Monster" brand cable for $120. And according to every single thing I've ever read there is absolutely no difference between that cable and the one you can buy at Monoprice for about $10. Unbelievable. Harold
I strongly DISAGREE. You really don't have to spend THAT much money on a trading rig. In April, I bought a Dell T3400 Precision Workstation with the latest Intel X38 motherboard that supports dual 16X PCI with not one, but two NVIDIA Quadro NVS-290's graphics cards and an Intel Core-Duo E8200 2.66 processor with 4 Gigs of PC-600 (800MHz) RAM, and Windows XP Pro . . . And it was just shy of $1,000.
Well I will agree that pretty much all of your 3000 or so posts are disagreeable. In this case you did not read what I wrote. I said "if you are looking for a higher end computer." I did not say anything about traders looking for a budget system that couldn't possibly handle the things for which I use my computer. For the handful of successful traders that use their computer for other things that require a higher end build, there are better companies to look at rather than Dell.