Choosing computer parts online

From HelpDeskWiki

When buying something for which there is a large selection, it's convenient to put everything into a spreadsheet, and then sort, compare, use a PivotTable (you should play with these if you haven't done so before), and so forth.

The site which will be discussed here is NewEgg (http://www.NewEgg.com). It has several features which make it good for buying parts from. There are other sites with similar capabilities.

• Ratings are a 1-5 (5 is best) ranking of the product by the buyers. Like any such statistical values, you should check to see how many people are voting for an item. A rating is only mildly useful if there's only a handful of votes. On the other hand, a rating of 5, in which several thousand people voted, is significant. This is one of the most valuable features of NewEgg, compared to some other computer parts sites. If you buy an item with a rating of 1, and it's a lemon, you have only yourself to blame. Note that the number of reviewers should otherwise have little bearing for you; there are plenty of popular lemons, for some reason.

• Reviews are written comments on the product provided by the buyers. Often, it's useful to see why some people vote low, even for a highly-ranked item. This is especially useful sometimes because a number of people will vote weeks or months after the purchase, after the product has been in use for a while, and has had plenty of opportunity to show issues. Also, some people will complain about issues which will not apply to you. For example, you can probably ignore a comment that an item does not perform well in Antarctica at a temperature of -50C. Or, a complaint about drivers may be relatively obsolete due to updated drivers on the manufacturer's website. NewEgg has an option to sort reviews by their rating; simply click the link to see ALL reviews, then use the pull-down in the upper-left to sort by rating from lowest to highest.

• Powerful search features. For example, if you might be looking at CPUs which are retail (have a 3-year warranty, as opposed to OEM, which only have a 1-year warranty) and which support 64-bit, virtualization, and multi-core, among other things. For retail, 64-bit, and multi-core, you can select options for that. For virtualization, or for selecting multiple choices for a single option (such as everything except Celeron and Sempron), you can use the Power Search. Without the Power Search, you'd have to winnow out some of the results manually, later on, although that's easy if you have Excel or (probably) OpenOffice, as you can see below.

• Bulk comparisons. You can set the number of results per page to 100 (the max), then check the box next to each item in the results list, then click on "Compare Selected". The resulting page shows all of the items in a row, with ALL of the details itemized, in table format. Some sites limit comparisons to something like 3 at a time, which is ridiculous when you're wanting to compare dozens of items.

The table is the good part. You can mark the entire page, copy, and then paste it into an Excel spreadsheet. You can then mark the entire page, RIGHT-click on a cell, select "Format Cells", go to the "Alignment" tab, and clear the "Merge cells" checkbox. Then, mark and copy the table itself, go to another page, RIGHT-click in the first cell, select Paste Special, check "Transpose", and then click "Ok". This organizes the items by rows instead of columns (which Excel can handle better), and also gets rid of the graphics. You'll then need to add a column and type in the ratings, since that is indicated solely by the graphics.

Once you're at this point, you can easily compare all of the items in columns, and so forth. For example, you can sort by price and then easily delete or hide all of the items with prices that make you cringe.

Note that the listings often have errors, so you may want to double-check the listed specs against the manufacturer's site. For example, as of this writing, the AMD CPUs show a frequency for "HypherThreading", instead of the "Yes" or "No" that it should show. Also, some items may or may not support something, but the field will be blank or inapplicable. HyperTransport, for example, does not apply to Intel CPUs.