As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently went through the trouble of restoring our family computer to its original factory settings in order to try to get a little better performance out of it. However, even after all of that work, the computer is still performing fairly poorly.
Therefore, I went to the Web to look for some fairly inexpensive options to upgrade the computer. I happened upon crucial.com. Now, I’ve heard the name of that Web site thrown around on a lot of forums, but I have never bothered to visit. In the past, it was fairly easy to purchase memory upgrades, because there were only a handful of different kinds, and every memory stick worked on every motherboard.
Nowadays, though, there are so many different kinds of memory, and so many of them will only work in certain motherboards, so it is an infinitely more difficult process. I would hate to spend $100 just to find out that the memory I purchased won’t work in my computer.
That’s where crucial.com came in. They made my life so much easier. They have a tool, available for download from their Web site, that can automatically scan your computer and refer you to the appropriate memory for your computer. It also shows you what memory you already have installed, and how to physically install the upgrades if you choose to purchase one.
On top of that, the tool explains the various restrictions your computer has related to memory. For instance, if you have a computer that requires you to install matching pairs of memory, it lets you know that.
It recommends the right memory configurations to purchase for your computer, and, as long as you choose one of the recommendations, crucial.com will guarantee that the memory will work in your machine.
I also want to say that, after locating the correct memory for both of my computers on crucial.com, I decided to try a little comparison shopping. I found that, for the items I was purchasing, crucial had the best prices around.
I wish there were other things in life that could be handled so easily. Imagine if you were able to drive up to AutoZone and push a button in your car to automatically show you the right wiper blades or headlights you need for your vehicle. Sure, for a lot of auto parts, you can scan through the various books and things they have on-hand, but that can be difficult if you don’t know the exact specifications for your vehicle.
For instance, I used to own a 1998 Ford F-150 pickup truck. Unfortunately, though, Ford apparently changed the shape and size of the windshield on the F-150 halfway through the 1998 manufacturing year. Therefore, you had to know whether you had an early ’98 F-150 or a late ’98 F-150 in order to purchase the correct wiper blades. It would have been so much easier if I could have just hooked up my truck to a computer of some sort and had it list the exact brands and sizes of wiper blades I needed.
What other things would you like to see this type of user-friendly advertising on?
2 Responses
interesting that crucial had the best pricing – how old of a pc is it? normally newegg or zzf has the best pricing…
One of the PCs is about a ten-year-old eMachines computer. The other is my two-year-old HP Pavilion.
I didn’t check newegg, and haven’t even heard of zzf, but I got a 1-gig stick for the eMachines computer and a 2-gig stick for my Pavilion, each for about $45.
The memory sticks I got were:
2GB 240-pin Unbuff DIMM 256MX64 DDR2 PC2-5300
1GB 184-pin Unbuff DIMM 128Mx64 DDR PC2700
I’ve got to say the ease of use offered by crucial was the main selling point for me. I didn’t have to worry about anything. I knew, if I ordered from crucial, that the memory would definitely work in my boxes.
Honestly, at this point, I’d be hard-pressed to figure out if I was buying the right memory without their tool, anymore. I don’t know the difference between DIMM and FBDIMM, DDR and DDR2, etc.
I just checked newegg, and it looks like I might have been able to get the same sticks for about $5 cheaper from there, but it also looks like I probably would have had to pay about $6 shipping, whereas I got free shipping from crucial.
What’s really wild is that, if I had ordered the crucial brand name memory from newegg, it would have cost nearly twice as much as I paid ordering it directly from crucial.