VisorCentral.com - Staples Associate Predicting PalmOS Demise

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VisorCentral.com (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/index.php)
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-- Staples Associate Predicting PalmOS Demise (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=18676)

Posted by usonian2001 on 10-03-2001 06:55 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by GSR13
Now, I am a PDA addict. I admit this. I also admit, that I rarely make a purchase without learning everything I can first. There are so few people in retail that really know technology, I am scared to buy anything based on an associates recommendation.

Gotta love the internet! Prior to purchasing my Visor Deluxe in January 2000 (back in the day - when you still hadda buy direct from Handspring!) It had been quite a while since I had made a substantial computer/electronics purchase; a hard drive here, some generic RAM there, but PDAs were completely uncharted territory for me. I knew about Palms but had never gotten to play with one, and I don't remember where exactly I heard about Handspring at the time... but it wasn't long before I found Visor Central, and after a couple of weeks of reading about Palms and Visors, I was a well-educated consumer!

Ever since then, I always do my research online so I can find which store (if it's a major chain, anyway) has the best price, get in, ask for the product, tell the sales rep (and sometimes the manager) three or four times that no, I don't want their extended service warranty, and go. For non-Visor-related gadgets, sites like C-Net can be good for hardware reviews, but I find it's nice to balance those with reviews from sites like Epinions.com.

But I agree with earlier posts... there's probably a little too much acrimonious behavior on both sides of the fence.

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Posted by Aardvark on 10-03-2001 11:26 PM:

Had no problem getting hardware from CompUSA retail, as I always did research ahead of time and no one gave me an argument...

'Cept for one instance. When I purchased my iBook, I wanted AppleCare instead of Comp's own package. The salesguy insisted they didn't have it, and that I'd have to order it direct from Apple.

An Apple rep was on hand to correct him, and teach how to fill in the paperwork.

They were s'posed to FAX it in and I'm supposed to get a snail-mail verification, but there's been nothing yet in a bit over three weeks.

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Posted by ashmed on 10-03-2001 11:38 PM:

Excuse my ignorance,

But what is AppleCare? (I'm Mac Challenged, guess that happens after 11 years of PC-Only use.)

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Posted by homer on 10-04-2001 02:29 AM:

quote:
But what is AppleCare? (I'm Mac Challenged, guess that happens after 11 years of PC-Only use.)

Apple's extended warranty service.

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Posted by ashmed on 10-04-2001 02:58 AM:

Makes sense. Thanks.

Posted by Magic_Al on 10-05-2001 06:31 PM:

Dilbert's Take on Tech Support

Posted by ashmed on 10-05-2001 07:40 PM:

VERY FUNNY! brings back memories of HP Tech Support phone calls.

Posted by Jupe on 10-05-2001 08:58 PM:

That's great. I've actually done that when on the phone with tech support.

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Posted by ernieba1 on 10-05-2001 09:39 PM:

Ooooo. Dell phone support. Overrated:

Me: there's a noise in my computer. I think it's coming from the power supply box.
Tech: I think it's the video card fan. Take out the video card and turn the computer on.
Me (after doing so): It's still making the noise. It's coming from the power supply box.
Tech: Try unplugging the proccesor's fan.
Me: How?
Tech: There's a cord.
Me (thinking "whatever, that's not it"): Okay. It's still making it.
Tech: I think it's coming from the hard drive. Try unplugging the hard drive.
Me (annoyed, I don't like taking out harddrives): IT'S COMING FROM THE POWER SUPPLY BOX!!!
Tech: I don't think that's it, but I'll send someone over tommarow to put in a new one.

And the next day, someone came and replaced it, and it didn't make the noise ever again.

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Posted by ashmed on 10-06-2001 02:00 AM:

I had problems with my DVD drive so I called Dell (basically it wasn't recognizing that anything was even in the drive) they wanted me to reboot my computer using the Dell Diagnostics CD (Umm, yeah, right how's that supposed to work?) so I did anyways and the girl on the phone couldn't figure out why the diagnostics program wouldn't even run off the CD. Go figure.

Posted by usonian2001 on 10-06-2001 02:12 AM:

I've been helping a somewhat non-technical friend of mine with his HP Pavillion over the last few weeks - One day he tried to boot his computer and got the dreaded 'Operating System Not Found' message from the boot manager. I twiddled with the BIOS and from what I could tell, the hard drive just wasn't being detected. I did manage to get it to boot once, but it promptly crashed and went back to the 'OS not found' message.

Now, he had several months' of work on this hard disk that hadn't been backed up to anything, and it seemed to me that there was a good chance the problem was with the drive cable or the controller/motherboard; the drive itself hadn't made any of the awful screeching noises a failing drive usually does, and I had gotten it to boot successfully once.

Since the machine was still under warranty, we made a call to HP tech support, who said to insert the recovery CD and reboot. Not surprisingly, the CD couldn't find a hard disk to reinstall to. The tech support guy pronounced that the hard drive had failed, and there would be nothing for it but to send the whole thing back to HP.

Fortunately I was able to establish that removing the hard drive wouldn't void the warranty, so I took the drive out, hooked it up to a machine at home, and sure enough the drive itself was fine - and I was able to salvage all of my friend's work.

The real kicker is that after all of that, he sent the machine off to HP and in about 4 days he received his same tower back, supposedly fixed - and went back to its old tricks within a matter of hours. It makes me wonder what exactly they did with it to 'fix' it. But he got them to send him a complete replacement (which I'm sure is a refurb), so all's well that ends well for now, I guess.

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Posted by homer on 10-08-2001 04:20 PM:

quote:
Dilbert's Take on Tech Support

Agh. So true.

I, sadly, have to deal with Qwest everytime my DSL goes down. it is ALWAYS their fault and it ALWAYS takes me about a week to get them to realize that.

One time, I had a long, heated argument with the Qwest.net tech support. She INSISTED that there is NO possible way that my DSL would be working WITHOUT installing the DSL software. I told her repeatedly that my DSL is working just fine and that I am having a problem with their email servers.

I finally broke down and said 'fine, I'll install the software, which software is it?"

"The one on your installation CD"

"Uh...I never received a CD"

"yes, you did"

"Well, what program, exactly, do I need to be running?"

"Netscape".

I immediately hung up the phone and went looking for a new ISP...

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Posted by septimus on 10-08-2001 04:25 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by usonian2001
I've been helping a somewhat non-technical friend of mine with his HP Pavillion over the last few weeks - One day he tried to boot his computer and got the dreaded 'Operating System Not Found' message from the boot manager. I twiddled with the BIOS and from what I could tell, the hard drive just wasn't being detected. I did manage to get it to boot once, but it promptly crashed and went back to the 'OS not found' message.

What model Pavillion was it. I had the exact same thing happen to me. I, unfortunately, did not have any of my savvy friends on hand, so all I could do was insert the OSD and type FORMAT C:

! While it sucked major big fat #%^$#% to loose 30% of my work for the past few years, it was fun to type out those 7 little characters, hit enter, and then hit "y"!

...oh, and to stay on topic, HP's website tech support sucks a lot. They have a messageboard on there that has been closed down, so far as I can tell, and I had to google-search the whole damn site to find my answer, since their offical answer is only "insert the recovery disk and screw everything else."

Sigh.

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Posted by usonian2001 on 10-08-2001 07:50 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by dietrichbohn
What model Pavillion was it. I had the exact same thing happen to me

I'm not sure, Dietrich, but he only bought it back in April, which is the real kicker. When the company I worked for a couple of years ago needed some PC's in a hurry they bought the then-top of the line HP Pavillions from the local Best Buy/Good Guys type store, and although they seemed generally junky and crash-prone (even after we replaced Win98 with WinNT) we never had a problem on the level of a hard drive or controller.

Format C: is a fun one.

Back when Microsoft introduced the first version of IE 4 with Active Desktop, I foolishly installed it on the Gateway Pentium 166 I had at work at the time. (Remember the earliest versions that couldn't be uninstalled unless you used the utility MS grudgingly released, and even that didn't work half the time?)

Within a few days my system was so messed up that it wouldn't run more than 5 minutes without crashing, and when none of my attempts to fix it worked, I decided to hose the hard drive. I learned a much of what I about Windows configuration and networking from getting that system back up.

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Posted by robert sibell on 10-08-2001 10:04 PM:

i mean GOSH WILLY, i check this site once or twice daily, i come home from school i need to read this WHOLE thread. but before we all got knowledge about store associates (like my dad) we still believed every word they say. i found handspring out all by seeing an organizer on tv, so i typed "electronic organizer" on metacrawler and handspring pops up,

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