Computer Renaissance

Computer Renaissance was founded way back in 1988 and has served millions of clients since then, inside the United States. At first it was simple store that commercialized used computers and components, which is a very profitable business, addressing the poorer customer segment and users that simply don’t want to spend much on computers, although they could easily afford new computers.

Today Computer Renaissance offers a wide range of computer products and services such as buying, selling or trading new and second hand computers and components. This way they keep customers from turning to less dependable used computer sources, while still offering new products for all wallet sizes. Buying back used components isn’t a very charitable service, because they usually offer customers only about 25-50% of the real price of the used product, so by reselling them even cheaper than sold on the market, they make a respectable profit.

They have a brilliant marketing strategy that includes services like consulting, fast response repairs in just 48-72 hours for which they offer warranty (mandatory when you’re using second-hand products for repairs). On the main website there aren’t any listed products, because every store decides which brands to commercialize/stock depending on transport fees, taxes and other regional factors.

They have special offers for Indiana, six different types of coupons can be printed from the website which give you 10% off for laptop repairs, cheaper back to school laptops …etc.

Of course these offers appear to be useless, because there are too many ifs and buts, so a very small number of customers can take advantage of these modest price cuts.

For $299 you can get a refurbished IBM ThinkPad Laptop with the back-to-school special coupon, which is a bit odd, because for only $13 more you can get from Newegg.com a new Compaq laptop that is also appropriate for school work. The Compaq Presario CQ61-411WM is based on a very efficient AMD Sempron M120 (2.1GHz) mobile processor, helped by 2GB of DDR2 system memory, a 250GB hard drive and ATI Radeon 4200 on-board graphics. The most important part of this laptop may be the graphics chip from ATI, because it’s very efficient and its speed is close to the more power-hungry nVidia ION and ION2 graphics chips, and it also plays compressed FullHD movies thanks to the ATI Avivo HD (UVD2) technology.

Another special offer wants to convince you to buy a G5 Power Mac for $399.

It looks good, just like the latest Mac Pro, but lacks the processing power of new Intel (or AMD) processors. When Apple decided to switch to Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors the speed upgrade was around 300%, meaning that the latest Power Mac G5 was 4 times slower that the a Mac Pro with an Intel processor.

The third offer seems acceptable, because it consists of a Dual Core “business grade” desktop with 2GB of system memory and Windows XP PRO license for only $229. If we compare it to newegg.com offers, we can certainly state that a new Dual Core system is much more expensive, a Pentium Dual Core E5300 with 6GB DDR2, 640GB hard disk and Intel GMA X4500 on-board graphics costs $284.

In conclusion it’s best if you check out prices of new systems before adventuring into a store like Computer Renaissance, so you won’t end up with a used system that costs only a few bucks less than a new one.

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