this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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I hope avoiding Amazon fits this community rules?

I need a few bits to resurrect an old PC. My Amazon cart is $68 with shipping - we're going to cancel Prime, but my wife is still working on downloading all her photos. Best I can do elsewhere is near double this PLUS shipping from 3 different suppliers and 2 of the suppliers are on eBay, which is also a US company.

I moved to Canada a few years ago from Australia where I had pccasegear, scorptec and others. It seems Canadians have become reliant on the US market and Amazon and we now have no competitive local retailers for this type of thing?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You can also try canadacomputers.com, while they did have a few incidents of price gouging during the big GPU shortage a few years back they are pretty reliable with having stock and semi-reasonable prices.

Also: check out ca.partpicker.com they do a good job of listing a variety of Canadian sites and their current hardware prices while you check part compatibility and power requirements all in one place.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. I know about PC Part Picker. The sites they list mainly sell current technology, which makes sense but it's not what I'm after. This stuff is for an old PC. It's not urgent - I'm watching FB marketplace for used memory and also considering buying direct from China, with slooow shipping, for the SSD and cable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Consider putting a wanted ad out locally on kijiji (instead of marketplace for the love of god people, we have had a better canadian alternative this whole time that isnt owned by US big tech). I've had good luck with that for old tech since chances are someone has something that'll work sitting in a bin collecting dust otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

I used to work at Canada Computers, years back. They're still my go-to place for buying computer parts. Apparently they treat their employees pretty good these days too; some old coworkers of mine are telling me how they got big pay bumps, profit sharing and benefits. I actually tried to get an assistant manager to come over to a nice white collar corporate gig with me and he said no because CC were paying him better than we could.

Tonne of nepotism up at head office level, and generally the corporate management sucks in all the ways that retail corporate management usually suck, but they're a hell of a lot better than Amazon, Newegg or Best Buy.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Electronics in general is hard as it's almost all made in china and the best you can do is find local resellers. Most towns will have small computer places. The only online one I know offhand is Memory Express. They don't have everything, but do have the basics and have price matching.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

I like Memory Express a lot. Bought my wife's laptop there. Those guys and Canada Computers are the two places I always check first whenever I need parts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I guess I should have stated the obvious - that I understand none of this stuff is going to be made here. I'm looking for local resellers.

I found Memory Express - 32GB of DDR3-1600 memory from them is $120 for Kingston or $220 for Corsair. I'm assuming they won't price match because the kit I'm looking at on Amazon is a different brand. I'm willing to pay more to buy from a Canadian reseller, but 3x price plus shipping??

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Oh yeah, that makes sense. Corsair, Kingston and Timetec are all kind of in their one price ranges so you can't really use that as a baseline to say it's 3x more expensive. I think the issue is they have very little DDR3 RAM. They have far more choices in DDR4, so it would be easier to compare fairly. It's hard to beat Amazon for selection, but hopefully you can find something that works for you elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Adding to what other people already said

  • For used stuff, https://www.kijiji.ca/
  • DDR3 and SSD are still available around. (But I find it difficult to get Timetec and Patriot cheap outside Amazon - might be worth checking pcpartpicker)
  • Old cables parts: check for small repair shops in your region, give them a call, they might have a box with cables.

And compare the prices with AliExpress. Occasionally, I find better prices here in Canada, but for cables, screws, filters, sadly importing is way cheaper. I think people buy in bulk from China and sell for 4X~10x more online here.

I don't know if you have tools and spare parts, but power cables are easy to fix if you follow the pin order and cable requirements.

Also, on FB market, or kijiji, post what you are looking for. People might have, but did not know there was interest.

I'm not sure if it is because of where I am living now, but +25 years ago there would be a whole neighbourhood of no brand tech stores, it was effortless to find old tech or next-generation consoles.

Canada is frail with local resellers, from the ones I had good experience with, Mike's closed, Canada Computers had data leak and price gouging in the recent history. All my interactions with Memory Express were awful, online or in person. I should have stopped after 3 times, but someone always says “they are better now”, shame on me. I have yet to try vuugo, pc-canada and shoprbc....

There are also some small niche stores, but they sell custom-made stuff, cables with different colours, or parachute chord sleeves. But then you will pay the price of your full cart on a single cable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

DDR3? mate let me dig around my old stash and drawers, I should have some somewhere unless it got lost.

Edit:
found it
@[email protected]
It's not 32GB so idk how useful it's gonna be to you, but I got a 4x4GB kit of Corsair DDR3 1600
part number CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9

Also got a Samsung 860 Evo 250GB
part number MZ-76E250

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Thanks for trying! But, I really need 32GB - I want to upgrade a machine that currently has 4x4GB. I know it seems wrong and I've thought about doing a whole new motherboard, CPU and RAM but that very quickly gets to several hundreds of dollars and puts more stuff in the ewaste bin. I'm confident I can easily get a few more years from it with $50(ish) worth of RAM.

The SSD is for another project - repurposing the motherboard and CPU that used to do the job of the 16GB one above :-) I'll probably go for a new SSD because they do wear out eventually and someone else pointed me one at a Canadian supplier for $20.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

If you do decide to go amazon just remember the working conditions the employees are going through. Then remember the distribution centre that Amazon shut down in Quebec because they unionized.

If AWS was not such a major part of the internet I would be going 100% boycott, avoiding sites that where hosted on AWS but that is not realistic. The most I can do is not shop on Amazon and cancel my Prime account, done and done. My prime account is up for renewal in November I think, but all the Amazon apps have been removed from my home and Amazon is blocked via my pi-hole.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/desktop-laptop-internal-ssds/139180/lexar-ns100-128gb-2-5-sata-iii-solid-state-drive-ssd-lns100-128rb-lns100-128rb.html

Memex doesn't carry 120gb ssds anymore it seems.

Psu extensions, most often the brick and mortar stores sells in sets, why its expensive. DDR3 and LP-DDR3 memory is also harder to come by now.