Oddly enough, a significant percentage of my head space is being taken up by long term relationships… specifically, I’m trying to find a laptop with which to commit. I’ve just had a bad run of luck, and it makes me kind of shy about it all. I was walking through Fry’s, not particularly interested in anything, when I happened to see a very attractive Compaq (a Compaq 3045us) just sitting there, waiting to be purchased. I called my brother, who works at Compaq, to check on pricing:
Him: No, no, no, don’t buy a Compaq or an HP notebook.
Me: Huh? You work there.
Him: I know, and I hear the stories about how they cut costs. I wouldn’t buy one.
Nonetheless, it was just to hard to pass up — the laptop had a beautiful 16” screen and a very reasonable price. I got her home, and it was blissful, at first. She was very fast, if perhaps a little glitchy and a little temperamental: if you shook the computer a little bit, the computer would reboot (not ideal for a portable computer!) and the DVD playback was a touch fuzzy. But… on the whole… at that point I had committed, and really, it was nothing that I couldn’t handle, and there was that beautiful screen. A nice screen will make you put up with a lot of idiosyncracies.
But I kept having problems with not being able to type correctly on the keyboard, which was driving me crazy, and I figured it was just me getting used to the new keyboard. But the more mistakes I made, the more I started wondering, until finally I took the time and figured it out — when you hit two keys fast enough, they swap! This would explain why I kept typing “Il’l” and “hte” all the time.
That this bug escaped the quality control is crazy. I tried calling the technical support, wanting to ask about BIOS updates and the like, but my experience was very bad: they didn’t know what I was talking about, and then they told me that they wouldn’t support the computer since it was purchased at a retail store!
Well, I just couldn’t take it any more. The screen was a delight, but I’m not going to enter into a relationship with a laptop if I can’t communicate properly with it, so I took it back to Fry’s (and, to their credit, they took it back without any fuss). So, now, I’m carefully considering my next laptop.
I’ve been burnt, you see, and am now cautious.
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