__p Since the last few years, resellers at Lamington Road are finding themselves increasingly compromised by illegal imports of memory modules and the flourishing gray market.
p____p According to Samir Mehta, director of Computer Corner, “Original RAMs are not easily available in market. Hynix is the only genuine brand in the Indian RAM market, after The Best stopped importing RAMs.” Mehta further added that memory modules of companies such as TA, Kingston and the Taiwan-based NCP are available in the market, but are not as popular as Hynix RAMs.
p____p Another longstanding reseller complained that some resellers re-label RAMs of unbranded companies with those of Hynix or other branded companies and sell it at a lesser price.
p____p Currently, different models of Hynix RAMs are available in the market with prices ranging from Rs. 600 to Rs. 5,000, depending on the storage capacity of the RAM. Duplicate RAMs, on the other hand, are available for Rs.400-Rs. 4,800. Besides being cheaper, the duplicates are so similar to the genuine RAMs that most customers fall for it, the resellers maintained.
p____p Explaining how to identify duplicate RAMs, Dilip Vaidya, proprietor of Channel Computer, said, “The difference in gray market and genuine RAMs is that the former do not run on genuine Intel, Asus motherboards. Moreover, duplicate RAMs slow down the computer.Also the brand/company name on duplicate RAMs is faded and does not quite resemble the original.”
p____p Other complications caused by duplicate RAMs include more time to boot up the PC, errors displayed on programs such as fatal error, VXD error, etc. Also most buyers of fake modules experience a blue screen after working on the computer for about one- two months. “Sadly, the realization comes only after a few months of its purchase,” said Vaidya.
p____p He further said, �A 4IC, which is of 128 MB RAM, can only work in a Pentium 4 machine. If the same is installed in a Celeron PC or a Pentium 3 PC, it reads as 64 MB only. That�s the reason why the 4IC RAM is also not seeing many buyers. Currently, the rage is 8IC RAMs.”
p____p Some resellers were of the opinion that there are unscrupulous importers who deal in duplicate RAMs from Hong Kong and Taiwan and sell them in India as Hynix RAMs or under a branded name.