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OEM (Tech Term)

by Dean on December 11th, 2005

OEM is short for Original Equipment Manufacturer.

This is the company that originally manufactured you piece of equipment. This is an important piece of information to have when you need to know who to call when your computer breaks, or your equipment is still in warranty. Seriously you do not want to call Dell when your Compaq PC breaks.

This is also good to know if you work in an industrial environment and you have a control system run from an old PC. A lot of control systems are usually a brand name PC like HP or Dell. The control system manufactures usually just slap their brand name on the front. As the equipment starts to get old the control system manufactures want you to pay big bucks for an upgrade. A lot of times you can nickel and dime your control system so you do not have a huge upgrade bill. Sometimes the control system manufacture has gone out of business and you end up supporting the system yourself. In any case it is usually expensive to upgrade (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars).

So know who makes your equipment, because knowing is half the battle. Right G.I. Joe?

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POSTED IN: Tech Term