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About LinkBacksMaplin a few years ago. But it was purely for a fan extension lead which would have cost more in delivery than the item itself elsewhere.
Other than that then a long, long time ago.
Maplin a few years ago. But it was purely for a fan extension lead which would have cost more in delivery than the item itself elsewhere.
Other than that then a long, long time ago.
2011 when I picked up my i7 2600K, Asus P67 Sabertooth, 8Gb ram, and EVGA GTX 580 from Fry's Electronics. Everything since then has been all Newegg orders.
1986 - it was 2 x 80KB 5.25 inch floppy disk used for disk drive 1541 for Commodore 64 !
3dfx Voodoo Graphics card in the late 90s to play the South Park PC game.
Probably around 2003, a Maxtor 120GB HDD iirc, which ended up being RMA'd a few months later because it was rubbish.
January. Bought a SATA cable and a couple other items at the local Micro Center. I prefer to buy from there when they have what I'm looking for. It's convenient to have a local store, I can refer non-technical friends there and know they'll wind up with something halfway decent at a reasonable price, and it's just a really cool place to browse. That's worth spending a bit extra, and a surprising amount of the time they have deals that are as good or better than Amazon or Newegg.
Since the 'rona started, other than an external mic that I got on delivery from Best Buy (where it was in stock, a rare attribute at the time), I've only bought components for 10+ year old computers. At that age, I usually wind up buying them used on eBay.
Maplin's closing down sale - everything was super cheap and they were discounting a further 20% at the checkout. You didn't find this out until you got to the checkout though, so I did another lap of the store and hoovered up some crazy cheap SSDs.
Before that, it was probably three or four years ago in PC World, and it was a peripheral instead of a component - they had a brand new Asus RT-AC87U router labelled up at £80. Impulse buy - they were retailing for almost £200 at the time. Still using it.
Last edited by Spreadie; 02-08-2020 at 11:02 AM. Reason: typo
I struggle to remember the last time I bought PC component at all, never mind where it was from.
That said, until Covid and shops shutting, I bought anything and everything I could locally and only bought online if I couldn't avoid it. Except for clothes. Shirts, etc, I buy online because, first, I struggle to find well-made stuff locally, second, I don't give a hoot for fashion and typically buy fairly plain t-shirts and polo shirts, provided I can get wdll made stuff.
Most household items come from John Lewis. We have one pretty local and the warranty is usually good, as is customer service. Recently, bought s few bits from Amazon as, well, lockdown, etc. Also, JL stocks have been dire.
But overall, I buy locally unless I either can't get it locally or doing so is silly expensive compared to online but even then, I'm highly selective about who I will buy from, online. Price is far from the most important criteria.
Why buy locally? To avoid, wherever possible, faffing with couriers especially if returns are involved. If I buy locally and hit a problem I czn usually take it back, get it sorted on the spot, and be home in no time instead of waiting around for couriers. i.e. hassle minimisation.
Oh, and normal shopping? Small independent local shops when I can, and local supermarkets the rest of the time. Never yet done grocery shopping online and don't plan on starting.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
about 3 years ago when a component (psu) turned up d.o.a.
Was right royally shafted on price as well
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
Shame John Lewis is heading towards disappearing then isn't it really.... someone who knows says they look unlikely to survive this year unless Christmas is "outstanding - like 3 in one"Originally Posted by Saracen999
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
September 2019 Central Computers Howard St San Francisco. Was there on a road trip/Holiday from Scotland that started in Las Vegas and ended in San Diego. Purchased an EVGA RTX2070 Super
couple of external harddrives at PC World/Currys last year, within a few p of online prices.
the shop at SCAN, 2017 and then again 2018 for that.
for big orders i prefer to go in to the sore and see whats available, save waiting around for 'order processed, now awaiting picking..' emails. just go in, see if it in stock, if not do the next alternative on my parts list.
plus was buying the systems for mates, who prefer physical shops, so if theres a problem they can go in and talk face to face to people, get it sorted quicker than using an online chatbox or over the phone.
Phew thats a tough one, about 10yrs ago I had to go to PC World for a 2.5" drive which was needed urgently for a broken laptop. I don't think I've been to a PC shop since.
PC World, but only for a printer.
I'd never shop at Scan due to their re-stocking fee. Plus if you have an issue, it won't usually fall in your favour. (DJI Mavic Pro drone - Known issues at the time, later fixed with firmware. Apparently nothing wrong with it)
I literally cannot remember the last time I bought something for my PC from a shop, we did have a Maplin down the road from where I used to work and I picked up a PSU for a work machine, but for personal use, probably before I started online shopping..
Last purchases were all in PCWorld and work related, needed some USB pen drives to test and offline build of an SCCM task sequence so got some 64gb Sandisk flash drives.
Needed to backup the above build so purchased a 2Tb usb hard drive.
Working on a customer site, only 1 network point so had to go and buy a couple of their el-cheapo switches, again for work.
For personal stuff, I think my last purchased in a store was a cd writer many moons ago.
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