Friday, April 16, 2010

The Laptop is Dead. Long Live the Laptop.


Welcome from my new laptop. The old laptop died, just about 3 years old to the month. I knew it was going so I had some warning. I lost a download of Neil Young's Greatest Hits. I think that's it. So far iDrive worked for me and saved all my pictures and documents. Heck, the drive on the old thing might still be good, it just won't power up. Maybe I can find an adapter and drag Mr. Young out of there after all.
*****
Our adventures begin thusly:

So I go to the Staples around the corner from Theatresource and I look at two Acer computers. One is a mini and is on sale for $299. The other one is regular-sized and at $399 has three times the RAM, a dual-core AMD processor, twice the hard-drive size and a DVD drive. So I ask the dude there if they have it and he says "Yeah, sure" and sends another dude to get it for me while he tries to upsell me on a printer and other crap. No. No. And no.

But it doesn't matter because they don't even have one in stock, just the one on the floor and a damaged one. So they send me to another store on Broadway and 14th. Bleh. That's a couple avenues over and a half-dozen blocks upward. But even more bleh is that I have my stepmom's car parked at $5 for two hours at the theater and the ticket will cost you a C-note if you're late (and boy, they do check.)

So I'm running up to the other Staples (past yet another Staples on Broadway which is apparently too lame to have any decent computers) and I'm thinking "Crippity poo -- they're so not going to want to sell me this computer." I have like 18 minutes to buy the computer and get back to my car afore the parking meter expires and Erf. Etc.

So I get there and I tell the guy I was just downtown and saw the computer I want (at first I thought it was an Asus, not an Acer -- sue me) and I said "Yeah, that's the computer -- do you have it in stock?"

At this point we're at T-minus 15-minutes until the computer becomes a hundred dollars more expensive due to parking ticket.

"I can check to see if we have it, but can I ask you a few questions first?"
"No. Can I just have the computer?"
"What are you going to use it for?"
"My car is on a meter and I don't have time. I have to get a computer right now or I have to go."
"I need to make sure you're getting the right computer for you."
"So I can't have this computer?"
"You can have the computer, but I need to do my job first."
"OK, forget it."

And I walked out. Got my car. And bought the same computer in Brooklyn where they didn't harass me (and they took "no" for an answer) about what I wanted the computer for before checking to see if they had one in stock. So Staples still got their money out of me, they just got it out of me annoyed.

Oh and the computer has a web cam. Illustrated here.

Windows 7 doesn't seem as irritating as Vista.

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