When purchasing a new computer, you have to make a choice that will affect the entire life of that piece of technology--should you customize? You may know that buying an "off the shelf" computer can save you money in the short term, but you may not know about the disadvantages of these pre-built systems. Take a look at the advantages of choosing a BarNETt Computers customized system.

To start with, our custom built systems offer much higher performance when compared to our major name brand competitors. We give you higher performance by avoiding the "proprietary" hardware and software that is commonly used to save money. For example, most "off the shelf" computers are built with "all in one" motherboards. That is to say, they have the video card, sound card, and sometimes even the modem or network card, built right on the motherboard. While this saves money, the cost-savings are far outweighed by two main disadvantages:

1. If any component (video card, sound card, etc.) on the motherboard goes bad, it often renders the entire motherboard (and thereby the entire computer) useless. Replacing one of these motherboards usually requires that you obtain the exact same part from the original manufacturer at a price often many times that of a non-proprietary equivalent. Wonder how that can be possible? Well the answer is supply and demand. They know you can't replace that motherboard anywhere else so the demand is high and the price goes up as their supply of replacements goes down. In comparison, any component in a custom-built system can be replaced by virtually any computer repair shop in the world without replacing components that are still in working order.

2. Most "off the shelf" systems have a maximum of 512 KB level 2 cache on the motherboard. Cache works to move data to and from your hard drive, CPU and RAM and so higher amounts of cache drastically impacts the performance of a system. Our base system starts with 1024 KB (1 Megabyte) Level 2 Cache on the Motherboard and go up from there!

Now, on to the processor. You will probably see that most lower-cost "off the shelf" computer systems are built with Intel Celeron processors. While we do offer the full line of Intel CPUs (Celeron, Pentium II, Pentium III, etc.), we build most of our systems using AMD CPUs (K6-2, K6-III, Athlon, etc.). We do this because AMD Processors are less expensive than their Intel equivalents and they consistently out-perform Intel in independent performance tests.

What’s more, when you buy a system built with non-proprietary parts, you have virtually unlimited ability to upgrade and the flexibility to obtain system upgrades from almost any computer dealer in the world. Our major competitors require you to obtain upgrades directly from them and because of the simple fact that the motherboard cannot be replaced with newer technology (because each motherboard is designed for one particular case only), your upgrade options are almost always limited to only the technology that is available at the time the system is built. Needless to say, a system that is totally obsolete in a few years has a much higher total cost of ownership than a system that can be incrementally upgraded virtually forever.

Top-notch performance, virtually unlimited upgrade ability, and universally available components are all things that you just won’t see with our major competitors. Add to this our superior customer service and industry-leading technical support and you have a combination that can’t be beat! So weigh your options and we are sure that you will find BarNETt Computers the best source for your computing needs.

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