Computer Warehouse, in Provo, UT, has very competative prices and knowledgable sales staff. However, I have had two very negative experiences with this store. The first situation was a couple years ago (sorry, I don't have an invoice number) when I purchased a Matrox Rainbow Runner Studio video capture add-on card for the Matrox Mystique 220 video PCI card. The box was shrink wrapped and the price was excellent (about $50 less than other stores on line or manufacturer). It was an older discontinued card because the Marvel G200 and the Rainbow Runner G video capture card had been recently released. So I was excited to be able to not only find the card in stock but even at a good price ($200). However, when I got home and opened the sealed box, I found that the driver CD had been opened and was missing. Okay, no big deal, I will just download the latest drivers from the Matrox website. It wasn't until I had installed the daughter card that I discovered that the special video input/output "octopus" cable that plugs into the custom VGA style port on the video card was missing. I went back to Computer Warehouse and they told me that it didn't come with the card but should have come with my video card. No such cable came with my Mystique VGA card; but I called Matrox just to confirm this and they said the cable is shipped with the add-on card I had just purchased. I returned to CW and insisted that they exchange the item for another sealed box on their shelf. This time I opened the box in the store and the CD had been opened and cable in that box was also missing. It was the last one they had in stock. They did offer to refund the card for full price; but Matrox customer support had told me in my last phone conversation that they would send me the special cable for free if the retailer was not able to help me. Matrox sent the cable and it arrived a few days later.

The other experience at CW was when I purchased a new Pentium motherboard to replace one that had died in my computer. Granted, I didn't want to put a lot of money into an old system and bought their cheapest motherboard, but soon found a real problem with trying to find SIMMs that were compatible with the board. They were standard 72 pin SIMMs but the board would not even POST. I finally did find a piece of RAM at Aroma Computers (a very good store) that worked but then discovered that the built in USB ports were non-standard and would not work with my Dazzle DVC USB MPEG encoder. I ended up returning the motherboard and bought one at Aroma Computers instead. Again, Computer Warehouse was more than willing to refund the product.

So, Computer Warehouse's customer service is very good and their people are knowledgable; but some of they products are low quality and they apparently repackage returned products to be sold as new.