Home Office Computing: Mother Knows Best - the perils of low-cost PCs - Buyers Guide

Cheap PCs are great--but working PCs are better

WITH TODAY'S PRICES, YOU'VE PROBABLY contemplated shopping for your next PC in the bargain basement. Even someone as tech-savvy as I, a computer magazine editor for years, feels the temptation to slap one of those sub-S600 jobs on her desk. Well, someone ought to slap me, `cause I fell hook, line, and sinker and plunked one down on my mother's desk.

Mom's old, reliable IBM 486 had worked fine for years, letting her type volumes of letters to friends, crank out hundreds of e-mail missives, and download plenty of Web pages--but it was slow as mud and had no CD-ROM drive. Doting daughter that I am, I decided to treat her to a $599 PowerSpec 4312 from MEI/Micro Center. It boasted a speedy 333MHz Pentium processor, an 8x CD-ROM drive, and enough hard disk space for her secret recipes and short stories.

We boxed up the 486, contemplated donating it to charity, and plugged in the new PC. It flickered on; we were greeted with the blue-sky Microsoft billboard and figured we were in business. Mom was so happy, she cried tears of joy. Soon I, too, was crying: The unit didn't work properly. We called customer support and they instructed us to pack it up and ship it back out. Mom didn't even get the chance to try one game of solitaire.

Days later, a replacement showed up on my mother's doorstep. She went through the drill of hooking it up all over again, eager to play a little digital blackjack before dinner. No dice. This one never made it out of Windows' Safe Mode. She called customer service again, only to be told it was a "software problem" and that she would have to fork over her Visa number and purchase a support plan before they would give her any technical advice.

Now, the advertising hook for these impulse-buy systems is that anyone--struggling students, low-income families, you name it--should be able to own a PC at these low prices. Well, where's the beauty in owning something that doesn't work smoothly? And once the one-month warranty expires, you're stuck with a broken-down box. It's hardly worth the cost to get it fixed.

The moral to this story? Well, it's a lesson my mother tried to teach me years ago: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

My advice is to consider a new PC an investment, like buying a car. You want it to last for years to come--and right now, my comfort zone on that score is more like $1,000 than $600. Go for the Cadillac of computers; leave the Gremlins for the suckers.