Branded or assembled.it is a dilemma that the great indian middle class( which I am a part of)has always been.
This has become a more pertinent question since the price slashes in the PC segment announced in the previous budgets .Earlier Home PC’s were the realm of the upper class as they cost 50k or more.But now Branded PC is within everyone’s reach.
But the question in itself, according to me itself is very relative.
When one says a branded PC, many companies which come in this list are Zenith, LG, Wipro, Patni, Sahara(?Apparently the chairman of the Sahara Group
had gone to South Africa and there was a small company coincidently called Sahara which manufactured Desktop PC’s, he decide to Buy it and this is how the Sahara’Branded’PC was Born).these companies donot even deserve to be categorised as Branded PC manufacturors.
What they do is essentially assemble the PC by integrating the various the components.They donot have any domain experience in this field, no R&D.No testing of compatabilty between the various components which I think should be done as thay are from different manufacturors.So they are also prone to the same problems as the Assembled PC’s namely frequent crashes, slowly degrading performance and non reliability.
The consumer is lured into entering a mad rat race for more RAM, Bigger harddisks, fancy chipsets etc.Features which PC’s promise today are absolutely not required in an Average Home PC.Hell these features would even be more than enough for high end applications like Animations, CAD, game programming etc.
So what I suggest is donot enter into a mad rush for the biggest, fastest and the costliest(which is a typical indian mentality), Go for a proven and stable configuration or architecture which would satiete the basic requirements of an average home PC viz. good speed, ruggedness to handle electricity variations .
So my Advice to all those planning to Buy a PC would be to go for a branded PC from reputed manufaturors who have a proven expertise in this industry, viz Dell, HP Compaq, HCL, Lenovo(formerly IBM), Datamini, Apple(if u can afford it).
The following configuration given by all the above Brands should be suffcient for the average home User.
Intel Pentium4 2.66GHz(extremely rugged, with on-board graphics and sound providing platform stability with enhanced graphics capabilities), Donot go for an AMD as it has a lot of heating problems. 256 MB DDR Ram , 40 GB hard drive, DVD Rom Drive and other features like ethernet, USB ports, good quality Multimedia features, front Audio jacks etc which are standard in all branded PC’s.Go for the LINUX operating system as it extremely Stable and will not crash as frequently as the windows operating systems.
In short Buy a Mid range stable Branded PC not a high performance one; cause even these Brands have entered the Rat race to give Highest performance at an affordable price which lures the indian consumer who always want to to get all the frills at a low price.The end result is you are queuing up for repairs after a few months.
After reading this review you’ll must have understood that Assembled PC’s are an absolute NO NO .why compromise on quality when you can buy a reliable product at say 10% more the price!