With today’s complex computers nothing beats having it chock full of parts that have lifetime warranties. Or as long a warranty as possible (in the case of chips and hard drives.) While you can’t make an entire state-of-the-art killer rig with 100% lifetime warrantied parts, you can at least make sure that your RAM, video card and power supply are covered for life (well, as long as you or the companies exist.)

Thanks to increased competition over the years, more parts that make up a system are covered with lifetime warranties. RAM (system memory) companies were the first to introduce such a guarantee because unless the user did something stupid like rub it across a shag carpet, it hardly ever went poof.

Then video card manufacturers like BFG got into the game with lifetime warranties for their expensive high-end overclocked versions of consumer graphics cards. Over time other video card manufacturers like XFX and EGA (as well as others) followed suit. Soon these companies expanded the lifetime guarantees to all their cards, which was great for the consumer, I’ll tell ya.

Later, power supply makers like Ultra covered their supplies with lifetime warranties too (as long as you register it on their website.) So that was one more part that was covered and protected in case of failure.

The good thing about companies that offer lifetime warranties for their products are that by and large their parts are comparable in price to products made by others that have limited warranties. So you’re not paying extra for those lifetime guarantees either like you were back in the day when RAM was REAL expensive and only a few companies were offering such coverage.

Having as many parts in your computer that have lifetime coverage is a great deal, since you’re not paying extra for the parts, why not make sure that if they fail you can get a free replacement? (Well yeah, you usually have to pay the shipping back to the company but its not expensive to do so.) It just makes sense.

Besides lifetime guarantees, it’s always a good bet to purchase computer parts with as long a warranty as possible.

While chip makers like Intel and AMD do not have lifetime warranties, usually if you wait for a good deal you can buy the retail chip for just a tad more than the OEM version (which has a 90 day warranty usually) and in doing so get a 3 year warranty.

Another good bet are Seagate hard drives which come with 5 year warranties (the longest currently in the industry for regular buyers) or Maxtors with 3 year coverage.

Recently my power supply gave up the ghost after about 15 months and Ultra replaced it for free (minus my cost to ship it - duh). The good news is that the power supply had a 3 year warranty (not a lifetime because I forgot to register it on their site - double duh) and even better the power supplies they send in return are brand new FULL RETAIL boxed replacements. With full warranties. So I went from a now-used, dead, only-covered 3 years power supply to a brand new lifetime covered power supply! Well worth the $9 to ship the dead unit out, I’ll tell you. See, since the replacement is a retail new supply, Ultra covers it as such and as long as you remember to register it on their site it has lifetime coverage.(I confirmed this too to be sure.) Sweet deal!

Shame monitors, motherboards, speakers, keyboards and mice don’t carry lifetime coverage but still it’s always best to get the longest warranty possible (and in the case of LCDs the lowest dead-pixel return policy) to protect your computing investment as much as possible. Also, if you look around you can even find computer cases that offer lifetime protection as well.

So… do you have any lifetime computer components in your system? What?

(And now with that wise bit of consumer advice out of the way, I promise the next post will have ‘crazy talk.’)