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Tuesday, October
5, 1999
Regarding the missing box and Fry's, I
got this advice:
Jerry
A> purchase a identical CPU
B> Remove new CPU and replace with broken CPU
C> Return the broken CPU in the new BOX for a
refund
D> Don't go back
Michael A. Boyle mboyle@toltbbs.com
Which in fact I had already thought
of. But I don't need two relatively slow Pentium II CPU's, and it
isn't that much money compared to the time all this would take. Mostly I
have learned a lesson. For those who have the
"advice" that one should never get anything that has been
opened, sure, but if that's all they have, and the whole point of being
out there is to get something for a deadline, there's no way to follow
that advice, which is, after all, something fairly obvious. And with
something like a CPU chip, in general it either works or it doesn't, and
if is going to fail it will fail in a few hours or days, not after several
weeks which this one did. I had kept that stupid box and the paper work
since June when I bought the thing, and indeed, it worked right up to the
day I turned the system off, and it wouldn't turn back on. In fact, I then
put a Pentium III into that slot, it worked, for one last try put the
older defective Pentium II in; that worked! But when I shut it down, I got
the same thing: no video, nothing. It was just dead. I have the suspicion
that if I put in it again it would work until the next time it was turned
off. (Turning it off and leaving it off long enough to get completely cool
didn't do the job; I had tried that before.) Anyway none of
this is worth the time it's costing, so I'll just eat the dead Pentium II
400 (which isn't a lot of chip to begin with) and only use Fry's when they
have a big blowout sale on something I want. No point in demonizing the
place. They know, I know, and they know I know that their clerks know less
about their products than I do. I expect that. I don't go there for
advice. I do think they ought to rethink their warranty policy: they know
I bought that chip there, they know I buy (bought) a lot of stuff there
because it was convenient, and they know they can return that chip to
Intel for a refund. If they have set their policies -- the first line
clerk at the returns counter purported to go check with a supervisor, and
I presume she did something other than go smoke a cigarette in back --
this way, that is their business. One knows they have to keep expenses
down to keep their prices low -- although Bob Thompson tells me that for
the CPU chips involved here they are about $20 over the market prices he
sees -- and they have to cut corners. It's convenient to be
able to find nearly everything in one place no more than fifteen minutes
from my house. I went there often enough that if I did get defective parts
the trip out to replace it not only didn't take long, but I was probably
going there anyway. In marketing terms they have made an expensive
cost-reduction move. Ah. Well. Enough on the subject. I'll still deal with
them, but not routinely. In the course of doing a new
column for Intellectual Capital, I have formatted the last one on Waco and
posted it on this site. Before you
send angry mail pro or con, read it all, and note what it asks for. And
why. And this morning's Wall Street Journal has an article
on electronics in airplanes. We had recent discussions here, last
week and this week...
Sir,
the discussion
here was timely, it seems. Today's (Tuesday) WSJ has an article
debunking the theory that cell phones shouldn't be used on airlines. They
opine that the real reason is the profit on the on-board phones, of which
they receive apparently 30%. I haven't seen the article, but it was
mentioned on CNN Financial hour this morning at 0600 Eastern Time.
We do blaze trails here, don't we?
Bryan Broyles
And indeed we do. The Journal sys, as I suspected, that
there is no evidence that using cell phones when the plane is on the
ground can do any harm to the airplane although it has an economic effect
on revenues -- those skytalk calls are about five times as expensive as a
cell phone call -- and precious little evidence that using laptops
anywhere in flight including on takeoff and landing has any safety effect
either. The conservative view is that prohibiting their use in the early
part of the flight does no harm, is minimum inconvenience to passengers,
and prevent the heavy things from being missiles if there is a crash. I'll
go for that. Have a look at http://www.windowsnt-advantage.com/adv-1999-09/adv-09-portable-pov.html
but of course
you've seen the story here already...
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