Inexpensive Computers in St. Louis


Everybody who knows me well knows that I am a cheapskate and love to find great places to find bargains. There is a new computer shop in Rock Hill called aptly The Computer Resale Store at 9250 Manchester Road (just west of Schiller's Photo, and just across the street from the Trainwreck Saloon). They sell primarily pre-tested, auction purchased Dell Optiplex systems with a monitor for $100 to $200 (they also had one HP and one Gateway there when I visited). They load them up with XP and free software (Firefox, AVG, OpenOffice, VLC Media Player, DeepBurner) and they are ready to take home, plug in and use. They actually have systems set up you can test and take home, so it isn't like EPC where you pick up a cold CPU box with a wiped hard drive where you need to build your own system from scratch. If you want you could take one of their boxes and just throw Ubuntu 9.04 (coming soon!) on it and have a nice home system with everything. They are so new they do not even have a web site up yet! Just stop by their store or call them at (314) 962-8400. And no, they did not pay me to say this, but I visited on Saturday and had a good talk with the owner's brother, Josh. It's just a little computer store run by two brothers and I want to see them survive!

Comments

Brian Wahoff said…
Hugh - thanks for the link to EPC's website. Just so you know, through being a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher EPC does provides computers preloaded with Windows XP, Firefox, Open Office, and a few more tools.

In the past we have also offered machines preloaded with Linux (first with Xandros then later with Ubuntu), with limited retail success. Our used computer store on ebay tends to show only a fraction of the inventory available - one thing we're trying desperately to improve.

Oh, and for those DIY inclined we still have tons of machines that are available without any OS.
4:13 PM
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