Alternatives to Frys?

[Gary Nichols]

Fry's lost my business a long time ago for just those reasons...

EVERY time I return something they insinuate that I broke the damn thing
(stickerless box, btw).  However, if you stick to your guns and see a
manager they will give in.  Just make a lot of noise... :-)  Just for
reference, the store at I17/T-bird seems to be a lot better at returns than
the baseline/I10 store.

As technically savvy as I am, occasionaly I have a question or two about a
product in the store... in my experience the people I've dealt with are
guessing half the time.  Granted they have a lot of products, but hey... if
you don't know go find someone that does???  Circuit City and Best Buy have
always answered my questions... or put me on the phone with someone that
could.  Now that's service.

BTW, I own one of those Linksys broadband routers, and they are NOT of
'marginal' quality.  They are completely configurable through a web
interface, can do port forwarding, built-in dhcp server, blah blah etc...
for $129 and take up the desk space of a mousepad.  Sure I could have done
all this with a linux box, but I'd rather dedicate that box to doing
something else (like experimental kernels).
On a similar topic, I just recently bought the matching Linksys 802.11
wireless basestation and a few PCMCIA wireless cards.. the airport stacks
neatly ontop of the broadband router without taking anymore deskspace.
Works flawlessly.  I'm sold.  Linksys no longer stands for shoddy quality in
products.

Just my 2 cents as usual...
Gary