Reminscing the history of PC stores in Robinsons Galleria

Robinson's Galleria is a mall in metro manila. Located on the corner of EDSA and ortigas. This is the wikipedia entry.

Disclaimer: I am in no way connected with Robinsons. I'm just reminscing about my own personal experiences in the 1990's and the 2000's in this mall regarding PC shops. My memory is not what it used to be so forgive me if there are some inaccuracies,

Unlike other old malls, Galleria has not changed much over the decades, only a couple of small wings added. So it looks eerily the same as it was before. I went there recently and since I have not been there for several years, the eerie similarity hits me. My mind was taken back to the early days. I was in college and postgrad during the 1990's and the 2000's and I did go there from time to time. Before gilmore rose to prominence, virra mall and a few other malls like robinson's galleria were the best places to shop for PC and other tech goods.

Go into Galleria's EDSA entrance and you see the supermarket on your right and jollibee on your left, same as it was during the 90's. Go straight and you'll see the beginning of the food court on your right. Go further a little more and you'll see an escalator going down. This leads to the basement shops, the lowest shops in galleria. At the base of the escalator, there used to be on the left the hardware store and the PC shop section. It was a narrow circular corridor with pc shops on both sides. Go right instead of left and the long underground corridor parallel to ortigas has several shops. 2 shops of note that seem to have survived from the 90's are a small gun store (not sure if its the same) and a big appliance store across the entrance to the basement parking.

Going back to the EDSA entrance, go up to the third floor and with your back to EDSA you'll see an appliance store to your left and a narrow circular corridor to your right. Then as now its full of dental clinics, cosmetological clinics and spas. But in the 1990's there was something special there in tech. One of the early net cafe's in the Philippines. I remember going there and spending hours surfing and downloading to my box of 3.5 diskettes. Its gone now

A few years later, the PC stores all moved to the third floor, where Saizen is now. Kenny rogers and red ribbon were there before and are still there now. A gun store next to Kenny Rogers seems to have closed.

Currently, the PC stores in galleria have fallen on hard times. They are relegated to a small wing next to holiday inn hotel. Some cellphone stores are nearby next to the food court.

On a side note, garry lising's joke shop 3 floors up next to holiday inn seems to be gone.

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the three threes rule of thumb in buying a PC

I invented a rule of thumb when buying a new laptop or desktop PC. I call it the "three threes" rule of thumb. If you have all three three's, you are guaranteed that your motherboard and by extension the entire PC is not too old. Of course this rule of thumb will get out of date soon (its now july 2011). At the end I'll talk about an addition to make it a "four threes" rule. But eventually, as techology progresses, this rule of thumb will be obsolete.

This rule of thumb relies on the happy coincidence that several new motherboard features just happen to have the number 3 on them. So for a noob person building or buying a PC, just look if the motherboard has all of the threes. Think of it as a "must have" list of features

1. DDR 3
2. USB 3.0
3. SATA III (although the more correct term would be SATA revision 3.0 orSATA 6 Gbit/s)


in the near future, the fourth three would be
4. PCI-express 3.0 

I did not include #4 right now since PCI-e 3.0 is not widely available yet in the philippines

update: of course like all rule of thumbs, this is not 100% accurate. Knowing the chipset model or the CPU socket of the motherboard would be more accurate in some cases but its more difficult for noobs

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