What hardware do you keep in stock for repairs?

I was recently asked via email about how I handle stock as a self-employed computer technician. You want be able to carry enough stock to be able to do your job, but you don’t want to be holding onto too much because their value can decline so quickly. Here’s what I do:Buy one or two of the essentials. With the exception of motherboards which I only keep in my workshop, I carry each of the essentials when I go onsite and a copy in the workshop.

I consider the essentials to be:

Various RAM

One of the current generation, one of the last generation and some laptop ram. I carry plenty of RAM because I don’t worry about it losing value. The lifetime value of RAM tends to be shaped like the letter “J”. The value falls until it hits rock bottom but once the manufacturers stop making it the value goes up and people put them into older computer that could use a little speed boost. In fact, sometimes its more of a “U” shape where the value of the RAM goes back up and equals or even beats the price of the item when you bought it new.As for RAM brands, I tend to go for Kingston because of its build quality and lifetime warranty

Mid Range Hard Drives

A mid range hard drive tends to hold its value relatively well. You pay a premium to get the larger ones on the market, then they fall to mid range rapidly and then slowly fall into low range. If I don’t sell them for a few months I usually put them into a generic office machine that doesn’t need a lot of space or use them to replace hard drives in old PCs.

For hard drive brands, I used to be a Western Digital man but now I have switched to Seagate for my clients because of their 5 year warranty. Avoid Maxtor like the plague, I see these dieing all the time.

Middle Range Video Card

Do NOT buy high end cards unless you already have a buyer, after a month or two a high end video card is no longer high end . Besides, most home and business users have low to mid range cards and the high end users usually already know to fix their computers. I carry a AGP, PCI Express and a handful of old second had ones. The brand I like for video cards is ASUS or Gigabyte with an nVidia chipset.

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