Michael: Prices are pretty competitive and falling all the time as the technology moves on. The thing to do as with everything else is to shop around. Bic Camera is pretty good on price and SofMap by Nagoya station often has low prices on end of line models. The key is not so much the best price as the best price for a given model. For example, Toshiba is very durable but not necessarily the cheapest. The weekends sometimes see special 'Saturday only' offers. The best price comes from taking time to study the market. Best deal of all is usual just as a model range is about to be revised, when the last of the existing range are massively discounted.
Nick: As Michael said, shop around. Check out the major shops and see who has the best price. What kind of machine do you want? If you want a DELL for instance, Bic is the only joint in town I know that sells them (correct me if I'm wrong.) Do you want a home-brew machine? Osu has more than a handful of stores selling parts; DosPara comes to mind, along with other similarly named stores. Tsukumo and CompMart can even make one for you.
Michael: Yes, but not a lot better. What I tend to do is to get things included if I can't get the price down - maybe a memory upgrade or a carrying case for a notebook.
Nick: I agree with that. I highly doubt you're going to get a store to knock like $300 off the price of a new machine just 'cause you ask them. Better to try and get them to chuck something in, like a memory card reader or something.
One thing you can do if you're desperate and even 500 Yen off is a deal for you, is to shop around and note prices. Go down and hit Osu, if you find for example that CompMart has a new machine for 121,300 Yen and Good Will has it for 120,000 Yen, go back to CompMart and tell them you saw it cheaper at another store. Chances are they'll knock it down to under their competitors price. If they don't, you can gently put pressure on them. "Gee, you lost a 120,000+ Yen sale over 1000 ... Yen" then slowly start to walk away. Or do the Japanese thing and just stand their sucking air in through your teeth (^;
I was able to get 2000 Yen knocked off my G5 for doing that .. and that was a Mac (the king of non-discount computer brands.) It can't hurt to ask, and a lot of store will do whatever it takes (er, within reason) to make a sale.
Michael: Nick is right about one store often matching another - but don't bluff them as they do telephone the competition to check!!
Michael: How long is a piece of string? All that is for sure is that whatever you pay that same computer will be cheaper in 3 months time! Makes like Sotec come in at basement level prices. More well known makes tend to be more expensive. Computers are no different to anything else in that respect. There are so many permutations and price depends on the spec'. One thing for sure is that you get more bang for your buck with a desktop than with a notebook.
Nick: If price is your thing, if you want it as cheap as you can get it, I would recommend Yahoo! Auctions. The prices of used hardware between the stores and auctions is sometimes dramatic. For instance, I was able to get off auction, 2 used iMac G3s and a beige PowerMac for 4200 Yen. If I had bought those same 3 machines in Osu, they would have cost me around 30,000 Yen. Of course Macs command a good price even when used, but auctions are in almost all cases the cheaper route.
The same goes for PCs, I've seen used Pentium 1 laptops for 20,000 Yen when on auction they go for 3000 Yen. Of course buying from auctions, you get no support and no warantee. And if the thing is busted, you'll have to contact the seller again to arrange things. Buy used from a store and they'll give you a basic warantee (around 1 month) which is better than nothing.
And don't expect a bargain from Hard Off unless you know what you want. I've found that machines still wrapped in plastic are most likely to be in perfect working order, while those stacked in the back, or worse, tossed in big blue bins, are probably all junk (hence the junk section.) Still even the ones wrapped in plastic can sometimes be had cheaper in Osu, so there you go.
Nick: I would recommend either word of mouth, or auctions. Word of mouth meaning an email to your friends, or a post on a message board, or a notice up at the International Center. You can then arrange to meet the person, they can inspect the item(s) and so on. Auctions can also be good for getting a good price. Make sure to take good pictures (no cell phone pics, please) and write up a thourough explination. Make sure to mention any problems, anything broken, missing.
Stores are the last option and will most likely give you the worst price, in my experience. Electronics stores will give you a mediocre price, and used places like Hard Off will give you the absolute minimum. I sold 2 computers to Hard Off once: 1 486 pc with monitor & printer, and an old 68k Mac. Both machines had monitors, keyboard & mice. Hard Off offerred me 500 Yen for the whole lot. I took back the Mac monitor and the price remained at 500 Yen. Since then, I've never been back to sell something.
You don't want to be greedy, but then again you want to get back some of the money you spent on the item, right? That's why I recommend selling to friends or putting it up on auction.
Michael: Like we always say in the NIPCC, it is your computer to do with as you wish. If you are not a gamer, for example, you don't need a machine that is orientated for gamers with overclocking and a megabucks graphics card (or even twin PCI express cards!!). But if you do a lot of video editing you want a big hard drive and lots of memory. If all you want to do is write e-mails and surf the internet, well, you can do that with a 1 GHz economy machine. And if you plan to have it next to your bed and leave it on overnight, you want it quiet, preferably with smart fan technology that reduces fan speed to a minimum. Going to have it in the lounge? Think about how it looks next to the television - they do not have to be beige these days !
Michael: There may be countries where a laptop cannot just be plugged in and used. But after 18 years flying literally all over the world, I have yet to find one. Every notebook that I have seen can be used with voltage supply 100 to 240 volts and I am not sure but I think that they are not fussy about the frequency. The only thing is that if you plan to use it to watch DVDs and you go to a country with a different region coding you only get four changes before the drive locks.
Michael: Toshiba direct and Dell supply in English. Best value is Dell. No experience of other languages. If you buy a barebones or build from scratch, of course, it is possible to install any OS you want, although you might have to order the OS from outside of Japan.
Michael: Dial up with a modem (need separate subscription for ISP), connect with a telephone card into the PCMCIA slot(ISP fee included for a FOMA card, not sure of others), connect with a mobile 'phone into the PCMCIA slot (separate ISP subscription needed), ADSL, cable, fibre optic. Worthy of a presentation all by itself and the NIPCC has done a couple. Too much to write as an answer to one question. Choice is speed and price. Fibre optic gives 100 Mbps (Mega bits per second), cable anywhere from 1 to around 30 and the same for ADSL. Dial up is 56 to 128 kbps. The price is typically proportional to the speed. If you have a wireless capable machine you might be able to get a free connection from an unrestricted WAP in your building - always worth checking !!
Michael: Set up varies. Cable and fibre optic are the most expensive. ADSL is inexpensive because, unless you go for a dedicated line, it uses your existing telephone line, so no actual construction, just some trickery at the exchange and a data/voice splitter on your telephone socket. Around 5,000 Yen per month will get a high speed broadband connection. Check out Asahi
Michael: Check out the out of and the out of date but still informative broadband info at NIPCC.org!