korfhage@prism.poly.edu (Willard Korfhage) (04/20/91)
I've been looking for memory for a 400t recently, and thought that a list of suppliers and price comparisons might be useful to some other folks. Specifically, I wanted to find out how much it would cost to add 16 MB to my workstation. The highest price I was quoted was about 50% more than the lowest prices I was quoted, so it pays to shop. Prices below include any educational discount we could wangle. This list is the order in which I called places. HP: $5000 list, $3100 educational. Applied Digital Systems (Trish Minty at (716) 377-7000) sell Clearpoint products, quoting $2800 for 16 MB. R-squared (Michael Lampi (206) 883-3116) quoted $3400 (or $3600, can't remember which), but was willing to beat Applied Digital System's price by a small amount. Infotek (Howard Henderson (800) 227-0218 or (714) 956-9300) quoted $3250, but was willing to beat R-squared's price by a small amount. Dataram (Mark Kaupas (201) 981-0071) quoted $2350. Other notes: 1) Everyone, except HP (I think), has a lifetime warranty. 2)Dataram allows you to trade up memory you've bought from them. Their example: buy 16 MB. Later you want 32 MB, so you give them back the 16 MB and get a 50% discount on the then-current price of 32 MB. More generally, you trade in X MB of memory to buy Y MB of memory (X < Y presumably), then you get a discount of X/Y. 3) All prices are subject to negotiation. Companies seem willing to meet the competation, and if you are buying a lot of memory, then they will definitely give you a discount. 4) I case you were curious how much 16 MB costs on other machines: Macintosh $620 Sun IPC $929 These are market, not educational prices. It would be nice if there was more competition in the HP market to bring memory prices down more to these levels. I hope this message will make people buy a little more carefully.