by Scot Hacker
Cars and toasters have had centuries to evolve into standards we can trust. All cars take the same gas, all toasters take the same bread. But documents written in Microsoft Word 97 can't be easily read in Word 95. You can't stick a VLB video card from a 486 into your new PCI Pentium. You can't plug your Macintosh mouse into your kid's Wintel box. It's a freakin' mess out there, and woe be unto the consumer who starts buying hardware or software without knowing what they're getting into.
As if that wasn't bad enough, there's a burning question hanging over the heads of those on a budget: should you wait a few months for the price of SuperWidget version 23 to come down a hundred bucks, or succumb to technolust and buy now? I'll tell you something: this is a ridiculous game to play with yourself. Waiting a few months is likely to make prices come down so much that you'll want to wait a few more months (this is more true of hardware than software). If you know you can save a few hundred bucks by waiting 30 days, then maybe it's worth it. But if you're just speculating, forget it — just decide what you want and plunk down the cash. I've spent far too much time feeling guilty about how I talked my own brother into buying a machine that could have been twice as powerful at half the price if we had only waited another year. That's stupid. Just think of the perpetual price slide in the computing universe as though it were the law of gravity and all the world were on a hill. Of course the price will go down the month after you buy — so what? Just be grateful you live in such an age, and are witness to such a bizarre economic phenomenon.
The key to making smart hardware and software purchases is not one of when to buy, but rather of what and where to buy. Let's get a bird's-eye view of the market and trade a few tips on finding killer deals, then zero in on specific considerations in the software and hardware markets.
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INTRO | FINDING DEALS | SOFTWARE | HARDWARE
By day Scot Hacker (yes, that's his real name) is a Ziff Davis techno-weenie, but by night, he's a goateed motorcyle-riding poet. Or is it the other way around? Check out his funkadelic Web site, the Birdhouse Arts Collective.
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