Computer Fun in Mississauga

Time for a quick review of some Mississauga-area computer stores. The story: last week my desktop became insanely sluggish. The processor was constantly maxing out, even on the most basic of tasks. There were no unfamiliar processes running, virus and spyware checks came up empty, plenty of available memory … I was stumped. I defragged and ran some diagnostics on my hard drives and everything appeared fine. Ditto for the CPU.

Eventually I came across a neat little program called Quick Bench (linked to from this site). Testing the read/write speeds of my hard drives, I identified the culprit as the disk I was using for XP and installed applications. This pissed me off, since it’s barely two years old and was a warranty replacement for the computer’s original Maxtor HD which suffered a catastrophic failure. Now on one hand Maxtors were recommended to me by Ed, the guy I bought my system and my parents’ from and who supplies RIM’s desktops — he knows his shit. But two failed drives will leave me leery of their products in the future.

Before I narrowed it down to a hard drive problem, I was leaning towards a failing CPU. At four and a half years old my computer is relatively ancient, and the Athlon 900 that powers it wasn’t cutting edge at the time of purchase (but it was tops for performance/$). I wanted to track down something comparable to replace it — anything much more advanced would require a new motherboard, which would have required new RAM … a slippery slope I wanted to avoid. If I could fix the problem, I could easily get a few more years out of my machine. Tracking down a used, old Athlon would require some searching.

So I emailed a bunch of computer stores in Mississauga to see if they had anything lying around; if not, could they recommend a used components place I could check out.

• AroByte Computers: Replied within minutes, close to midnight on a Monday night. Said they’d check at work the next day. Nice responsiveness! Never heard back. [sad shake of the head]
• Premier Computer Canada: technically in Etobicoke … which I guess is technically Toronto now … but close enough physically to include in my search. Been visiting their site for years to benchmark prices at KW & London computer stores. Quick response the next morning — didn’t have what I was looking for, but suggested another company to try. They’ll get future business from me.
• The ‘didn’t have what I was looking for and couldn’t suggest a used computer store but at least they replied’ winners: ARCO Computers, ECJ Computers, Ru-Link Computer Corporation.
• Infonec Computers: apparently have 11-year olds answering e-mail. Seriously, the dude REPLIED IN ALL CAPS. And suggested I check a user computer store. Thanks jackass. Maybe that’s why I asked for a suggestion of one.
• Couldn’t be bothered to reply and don’t deserve so much as a hyperlink : 1 Click 2 Computers, DuraPC, OZTech Computers, Factory Direct, Wintronic Computers Plus, Computer Depot, Liata Computer Co., Computer Central. Thanks for nothin’.

Wrap up: I picked up a new hard drive, copied data over, and that has solved the problem. Got a decent enough price from ComputSolutions Direct on a Western Digital 160 GB model … a few bucks more than Premier, but with the added convenience of being right near work.