Where to shop in OC (California)??

[The Navigator]

I have been to too many shops and departed with feeling of wanting. Where are the drool shops? Not the generic 'Fry's' or 'MicroCenter's'. Most of the shopping that I do for pc parts, is on the internet (and I do a lot of it), but I am a touchy feely kinda guy when it comes to goodies and such. Could someone help please?

[lipsons]

I've lived in orange county california for only 3 years now and I really haven't found any great electronics stores. The closest we have is good guys, but that leaves me with mixed emotions because it reminds me of the strip joint in DC... Any way... back to the topic. Best buy, Good Guys, and Circuit City are about the best i can do. Don't buy from Fry's unless you are sure that's what you want. The returns there are terrible!! There are some speciality stores for big screen TVs, but I don't have experience with them yet. Good luck!

-Steve

[The Navigator]

Thanks Lipsons for the reply, but unfortunately, those too fall into the same catagory. I have lived in OC for 33 years (excepting all the years I spent cruising the world on mega-yachts...but that is a different story), and I have been to all the 'big' generic stores to no avail. I put together about 4 high end pc's a week in my spare time (two of the three that I have running on my home network are 1.2Gig DDR systems {Gigabyte GA-DX & ASUS A7A266}. The components for these types of systems I have to buy on the internet because I cannot find them in the shit 'big' vendors. God forbid that I want to modify a case, or find the newest/baddest cooling equip., or a CPU that is not already five months old. Something other than the same old mundane crap that someone is trying to get off their shelves (due to over-ordering) to make room for some three month old crap. Would that be asking too much? I know of some stores like Marvac in Costa Mesa (mostly electronic switches, diodes, capacitors, speakers, tools,etc.), but none of them offer peltier, water or any other type of cooling beyond two or three overpriced case or cpu fans. Selection of cases and power supplies is severly lacking (I always have to mod those). I really do not mind ordering on the net, but it would be nice to have a place to go so that I can touch , or at least inspect, before I make the purchase.

I would never stand in one of those sheep lines they call the return line (my wife on the other hand...baa-baa-baa), there are plenty of other people that want what I would return, and I usually find a pc to put it into eventually, but thanks for the warning.