Micro Center Computers

RadioShack Corporation, a huge chain of electronic retail stores in the US with more than 4500 store locations today, was founded in 1921. As it goes in the business world, two x-employees (John Baker and Bill Bayne) founded their own company, Micro Center Computers, probably after learning RadioShack marketing strategies on how to spread and make profit.

Micro Center Computers has just a few retail stores per state, strategically placed for efficiency, trying to avoid building a large number of stores that would undermine stability and may prove to be fatal investments. Making an on-line store is the smartest step for any company to make because of its high efficiency. Basically even with a very poor advertisement you start receiving orders for which you need just a couple of extra employees to verify, confirm and send them out to customers using one of many courier services that already cover every part of the world.

Micro Center Computers has an very easy to use on-line store where you can also check for products available for pickup at any retail store in a specific location.

They sell a limited number of brands: Acer, AMD, Antec, Apple, Corsair, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Linksys, Microsoft, PowerSpec, Seagate, Sony, Toshiba and Western Digital.

Although this is a very short list of manufacturers, it includes the most important hardware and software brands.

One of the most interesting products is a cheap laptop computer that costs only $289.99.

Although it’s a refurbished laptop, its configuration is not so old. It’s based on AMD’s Athlon 64 1.6GHz processor that with the help of 3GB of system memory runs Windows 7 without any problems. The on-board graphics chip is a generation older, but ATI Radeon 3200 is almost as fast as ATI’s Radeon 4200 or its equivalent from the Radeon 5xxx series (the latest).

A very good product can be found in the monitor section, for only $99 you can get a ACER 19” Wide screen TFT monitor with both VGA and DVI inputs. It doesn’t have a 16:9 aspect ration like the latest models, but 16:10 is a better choice when you don’t work only with HD content and also the 1440 x 900 resolution is somewhat bigger than the “HD Ready” 1366 x 768 resolution.

Because Micro Center Computers sells second hand/refurbished products too, you can get your hands on a Dell Optiplex GX260/270 desktop computer system for only $129. It’s not a very fast system, but with Windows XP it can handle any general home or office programs. It has a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, which is slower than Intel Atom processors, but with 512MB of DDR memory (expandable to 2GB) it can be a very good budget solution.



As for multimedia, HD is out of the question without a proper graphics card, only DVD resolution (SD) DivX files can be played without any problems, and also YouTube 360p clips should run perfectly with a proper Internet connection (at least 2MBPS download speed).

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