The mistake I made in the past is that I would only shop at one store and really screwed myself. My “come to Jesus” moment arrived when I was trying to buy 2 Gigs of RAM for my server and that vendor tried to charge me $1,200 for two sticks. Then they tried to talk me down to $500 for a quarter of that memory. This first company also tried to sell me a second Pentium 3 processor with the correct stepping for… $1200! (See a pattern here?) The server originally cost $1200, I would have had to spend twice as much again to max it out.
A friend of mine turned me on a local computer store and I only paid $120 for two sticks of RAM that equaled 2 Gigs. I paid only 10% of what the first company offered, and I never EVER went back to them.
The lesson I wish I learned earlier is that you need to actually do your homework; do your own research and ask questions. Don’t just take a sales person’s word for it, now that you have “The Interwebs” look around.
Also, I like having Tiger Direct and New Egg, two competing sites that keep each other inline.