If you could avoid it, never straight away talk to a salesman. And definitely no impulse buying! I should’ve known better, I ended up buying a below-par digicam back in September.

I helped 2 friends in KL a few days ago with their notebook purchases. I would apply the same method when buying anything (not just IT related things):

1. Decide what is your budget, and how much more than that you’re willing to stretch. In this case, the friend’s budget was RM2,500, but he was willing to go up to RM2,700;
2. Get as many quotations as possible, but not too many that it might get you more confused. We got 12 from Low Yat, although in hindsight, 5-6 would’ve been plenty;
3. Get out of the building, go somewhere to do your homework. We went to Coffee Bean on the ground floor;
4. List out the minimum spec you’re willing to live with; sometimes you have to further trim down your options;
5. Make your shortlist eg, we shortlisted 2 companies listing the same product at the same price i.e. RM2799;
6. Go to all shortlisted companies and see how much more they’re willing to discount, and how many freebies you can get. One company offered RM2680 and 3 freebies: lock, headphones with built-in mike and optical mouse. The other stuck to RM2799 but offered an additional 512MB DDR2 RAM (to make it a total of 1GB DDR2 RAM), plus the same 3 freebies.
7. Make your decision: the friend decided on the former.

Others factors to consider:
- brand - some cheapo ones are not worth it. I saw a brochure for APAQ (if not mistaken) whose prices went down to incredible levels for similar specs with the more established brands.
- local support - easier to fix problems, especially during warranty period. Having said that, local support does not necessarily mean fast. My Acer notebook’s hard disk needed to be changed during the warranty period, and I brought it to Acer’s branch in Sadong Jaya, but still it took them a full month to get me a new notebook.
- Go thru critical reviews - especially ones that compare the notebooks of different make & model at similar price levels.

So how did we do? We got an Aspire 5833 (I cant remember the exact model) for RM2680 (list price RM2799) with 3 freebies. After doing all that, I can safely say that for price range below RM2700, it’s the best notebook money can buy in Malaysia at this point in time. Spec includes the following: Core 2 Duo CPU, 120GB HDD, 512MB DDR2 RAM, card reader, DVD burner, WiFi, Bluetooth. Only thing missing is webcam, but that was the one feature he could live without.
The other friend’s budget is RM2,000 so it’s gonna be definitely lower in specs.

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