This is odd: something finally went right here.
There is, of course, a backstory to this. And you could probably read all about it by hitting only a few hundred different .htmls. Or I could just recount it all here real quick.
It begins late in 1998. I bought a Sony Vaio PCG818 laptop at SoundTrack for three thousand bucks. And I added the extended warranty for five hundred more, so that, if it ever broke, they'd fix or replace the thing for me. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Naturally, it broke a couple of weeks after Sony's year-long warranty ran out. So I tried to get SoundTrack ot fix it for me. What happened instead was that they took it away for four months [their policy suggested that they had up to two weeks to fix it before admitting that it was broken and just giving me a new one] and finally gave it back after I threatened to charge them with theft. Not that they'd fixed it in those four months; I still have it here, mostly in pieces; the processor and screen are burned out, and they no longer want to talk about fixing or replacing it. So I no longer buy stuff from SoundTrack/UltimateElectronics/AudioKing at all.
In the summer of 2001, needing a working laptop and having the 818 which SoundTrack wouldn't fix, I went to CircuitCity and bought a Sony Vaio PCGFX210. This time, the thing was two thousand bucks, but happened to be on sale for about fifteen hundred; the extended warranty totalled that up to about two thousand even.
About a month ago, it finally broke. So I took it back to CircuitCity to have it fixed. After all: I'd bought it there because, according to rumour, they actually did that sort of thing when things broke after you'd got the extended warranty on them.
Instead, they told me to call an eight hundred number and talk to someone else about it.
I did. I spent several hours on hold as my StarTac battery drained [periodically plugging it into the car recharger and various outlets wherever I was at the time] before finally getting someone who knew enough about computers to understand that he knew less about them than I do. I told him that the computer overheated and shut itself down after a few hours even in bios mode; he agreed that only a broken computer would do that; he sent me a box through UPS to send it to Dallas in to have it fixed.
Good.
I got the box and sent it back--with the computer in it--on 1st October 2002. I watched the thing head for Louisville, Kentucky through the tracking number at ups.com.
The problem with all of that was that the only computer I had running Windoze was the broken 818. So I went to BestBuy and nearly bought a Sony Vaio PCGGRX650 before noticing the HewlettPackard ze5185 which, for the same money, had a 2.4GHZ 8886 and a sixty gigabyte drive; I bought that instead.
Naturally, I had to buy it from the website, since it was too new and high-end to be in a real store. But it was 'in stock', so I could have it the next day by paying a little more for the overnight delivery. I did.
Which is to say that I paid a little more, not that I got it the next day.
After a couple of days, I got an EMail from BestBuy.com about the computer being 'still backordered', even though the website still listed it as being 'in stock'. They'd send it overnight as soon as they got it in.
Which is why I got the ze5185 at literally the same time that the Sony 210 came back. The UPS guy had them both in the same truck.
Not that the story ends there.
The 210 didn't work. The DVROM was fixed, but it still shut itself down in less time than is takes to reinstal the AT&T software to connect a computer to the cablemodem. But that's okay: I've got the ze5185 now, too. As long as one of the two works--
The ze5185 didn't work. It also shut down on its own, without warning, and without explanation.
I took the 210 to CircuitCity to ask why it had been sent to Louisville instead of Dallas, and had come back with BestBuy stickers all over it. To date, I still don't have a full answer on that one. The manager said she'd call Corporate on Monday [this was Saturday night] and find out what in hell they'd done.
I went to BestBuy with the ze5185 and explained the problem it had. I'd gone into the HP.com chatroom to ask their people why it kept shutting off, so I had a printed transcript beginning with various troubleshooting questions and ending with the suggestion that the thing had been put together wrong in the first place, and that the best thing to do would be to take it back to BestBuy and trade it for a different one.
So I did. Ironically, the BestBuy store had one in stock. I'll never understand how or why that happened after the same people had told me that they wouldn't have it in stock before November because it was too high-end for them to get. I traded computers and left with the working ze5185 I'm typing on right now.
Yesterday, after not getting a call from the CircuitCity manager on Monday, I took the 210 back in to see what the problem was now. The problem turned out to be that Corporate hadn't really wanted to talk about a computer which was supposed to go to Dallas to be fixed, and had instead gone to Louisville to be not fixed and to come back with BestBuy stickers all over it. The manager is reportedly still trying to get an answer regarding that one.
Meanwhile, she concluded that Corporate were morons and that I shouldn't have to go without a computer [she had no way of knowing at the time that I'd bought the ze5185 already] just because they were evading the issue. She took the 210 and gave me a gift certificate for two thousand bucks. So now I can go get a laptop from what they have in stock.
Not that I really needed one. But having a second laptop accomplishes a couple of neat things. First, if and when this one dies, I have the other to fall back on until this one gets fixed or replaced again. More importantly, if I have two laptops, Hunter can use one to play games at restaurants while I'm working, instead of talking to me and singlehandedly wrecking whatever novel I might be trying to write.
Following that logic, we went back to look at laptops. One thing they didn't happen to have in stock--because it's too high-end to have there, of course--was the Sony 650. Which is fine, since I have the ze5185 which is better anyway.
Since Hunter would be using whatever I got for two thousand bucks far more than I would, I left it to her to pick one out. She settled on a ze1250, which is slighty less high-end HP than the ze5185 [which, ironically, they had in stock] which...wasn't in stock.
They did, however, have one in the back which was the same as a new one, but already opened and therefore only twelve hundred bucks. Being the same as the new one, it also had the same two-hundred-dollar rebate on it.
Oh good.
So I got that. And, of course, the extended warranty. Leaving me about six hundred bucks in store credit. Which I promptly spent.
I think there was a gameshow a few years ago where you got $X to spend in a certain number of seconds. I'd have won. In the end, I was buying five-dollar reams of printer paper to end up at exactly zero. We'd have broken even if Hunter hadn't wandered off to buy a couple of things on her own; but she had her own money to spend, so it worked out about the same.
So that's that. I've got a working ze5185 here which roughly negates the need for even a desktop system, and a surroagate laptop replacing the old Sony with twice the processor and three times the drivespace, as well as a built-in CDRW, which helps matters a lot. Plus an extra six hundred bucks' worth of junk I didn't particularly need, but...CircuitCity sell DVDs and PS2 games, see, and....
Anyway: that all worked out nicely. There was the momentary concern when Hunter's laptop showed the mathematically-impossible RAM count of 496 megabytes before we worked out that she had 512 total, minus the sixteen devoted to the integrated videocard [I'd never heard of one of those]; but everything makes sense again now.
At least where all that's concerned. |