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I'm standing in a Circuit City in coastal North Carolina; Richard--young, tan, and friendly in a falsely ingratiating way--is helping me buy a computer. Behind him, Christina Aguilera shimmies on a bank of video screens. Richard shows me a fully loaded 1-GHz Compaq Presario going for around $1000, not including a monitor. A truly terrific deal, but he doesn't appear to know that.

"These here are your drivers," he says, indicating the floppy, CD-Rewritable, and DVD-ROM drives, "and it comes with a 16-bit graphics card, which goes well with your NEC Mitsubishi monitor."

It's bad enough that Richard confuses the graphics card with the sound card and says "Mitsubishi" when he means "MultiSync," but then he commits the cardinal sin of lame computer salespeople: He presses the DVD drive's button, slides out the tray, and tells the coffee cup holder joke. His advice is as bad as his jokes, and when I walk out of the store with the Compaq, he seems almost as amazed at the sale as I am. But I have a good excuse for buying a new computer from Richard the annoying: I was on a mission from PC World.

Talking Shop

PC prices have fallen to new lows, but figuring out where to buy your next PC is still a challenge. So on one long weekend last May, we set out to find the best and worst places to purchase a computer. Five undercover shoppers in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Texas each visited

Eight retail stores: Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Costco, Gateway Country, Office Depot, Staples, and an independent retailer, also known as a mom-and-pop. We browsed the Web sites of six online merchants (Buy.com, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, PC Connection, and Polywell), then called each one's sales line to check out their phone sales force. We bought one computer from a representative mom-and-pop store and one from each other vendor (14 in all), plugged them in to make sure they worked, then returned them and waited for the refunds.

Our target PC was a 1-GHz system with 128MB of RAM, a 30GB hard drive, DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives, a V.90 modem, a 32MB NVidia graphics card, an office suite, and a 17-inch monitor. And our firm price limit was $1500, not including shipping. Last year it would have been impossible to get that configuration for that price; these days it's a cakewalk.

Along the way we rated the seller's computer selection and the sales staff's knowledge, courtesy, and efficiency. We tossed in red herrings--asking questions such as "Can I get this system with 200MB of memory?"--to see if they'd swallow the bait. We also rated the vendor's service when we returned the PCs, tracking how long it took each company to refund our money, and noting the lengths to which the vendor would go to keep the sale. Finally, we picked the best and worst channel--retail, phone, or Web--for price, selection, service, and more.

The best choice in nearly every category was the Web. And small wonder: Web shopping allows you to compare a broad selection of brands and systems, mix and match components, and get scads of information at any hour of the day or night. The benefits are so compelling that retail outlets have tried to duplicate them. Nearly every computer retailer we visited had a Web-based kiosk at which you could configure systems and have them shipped directly to you. (The Circuit City outlet we visited in North Carolina also had one, but the sales rep, Richard, could not figure out how to use it.)

Even the phone sales reps we talked to seemed to be clicking through the lists of specifications available on their company Web sites. Meanwhile, Gateway and HP have addressed one of the key drawbacks of Web shopping--the lack of human contact--by adding live chat capability to their online stores.

As in the past, Dell's site is best overall. It's easy to navigate, and the company offers highly configurable PCs and useful buying advice. But getting our refund from Dell took the longest--30 days.

With online stores like Dell's at your fingertips, why leave the house?