Advent calendar - 16 - Notebook
Wednesday, December 16. 2009
Probably a misguiding title But for today I wanted to put the surprise behind the break
Continue reading "Advent calendar - 16 - Notebook"
Probably a misguiding title But for today I wanted to put the surprise behind the break
Back in 2001 I had this brilliant idea where to get a new notebook: built to order by the growing pc manufacturer Gericom (as you see I have always had a favor for Austrians..). I chose a quite portable model, the brand new Gericom Genio, which should be available any day at that time. Weighing less than 3kg and equipped with a Pentium 3 mobile with 800Mhz and 256MB of RAM, a 20GB Hdd and a 14,1” Display it was top edge at that time. I was willing to pay over 4000 DM for this computer (far less than a Toshiba or IBM computer would have cost me – but still a lot of money for a computer). But it went as bad as it could – I had to wait 8 weeks and the advertised IrdA and LAN ports were not available. Unluckily I was not wise enough to just send the long awaited computer back. The not connected LAN port should have been enough reason to do this (obviously Gericom did not manage to equip the computer with a suitable mini-networking card). Anyway. After acquiring the missing features via PCMCIA and USB I’ve had my happily ever after with this notebook. At the moment it still rests in one of my book shelves. If you are interested in buying it, I would be happy to offer it to you as a bargain!
So why am I writing about this topic now? I’ll explain in my one of my next posts.
How long can it possibly take to break a brand new computer? Well, you might guess a day or a week, or be optimistic and say two years, directly after the end of the warranty. It took me exactly 10 minutes to get my brand new HP 6720s notebook out of business. I got it broken before I had set it up properly! All I had to do was to close the notebook, while it was still installing, but the Windows Vista energy management was already running. The installation failed because of the power down process so Vista wants a reinstall. But HP no longer buts recovery discs into the package and due to some bug I can't access the recovery partition. Didn't think that I would need the HP service that fast...
A friend of mine drew my attention to a special offer by amazon.de today. Visiting there electronics page you can order cheap notebooks at the moment. Have a close look at the screenshot on the right. I guess the offer won't be available for too long on amazon.de, so I saved it for you. It is a Sony Mini-notebook - one I'd always dreamed of - for some 19 Euros! Unbelievable! (Currently technorati has 19 blogpostings tagged with "amazon" on this issue. Guess by noon the story will be through a lot of more blogs..)
Edit 1:30pm: Meanwhile Amazon has changed the price of the notebook, and the order mysteriously has disappeared out of my order box.
Edit 3:20pm: Got the following statement from Amazon:
Guten Tag,
es gibt Neuigkeiten zu Ihrer aktuellen Amazon.de-Bestellung.
Einige Artikel wurden von uns auf der Website irrtuemlich fuer ein Hundertstel des richtigen Preises ausgezeichnet:
"Sony Vaio VGN-TX3HP/W 11.1 Zoll WXGA Notebook"
"Lenovo TS ThinkPad R60 15.1 Zoll SXGA Notebook "
Bitte entschuldigen Sie den Schreibfehler.
Daher haben wir den oder die Titel aus Ihrer Bestellung/Ihren Bestellungen gestrichen:
028-7684570-2102109
028-6605088-3666113
Wir hoffen auf Ihr Verstdndnis - vielleicht haben Sie sich ja schon selbst |ber die Ungewoehnlichkeit dieses Preises gewundert.
Bitte beachten Sie: Laut unseren AGBs kommt der Kaufvertrag ueber ein Produkt immer erst mit Absenden der Versand-Mail zustande. Hilfsweise erklaeren wir jedoch die Anfechtung wegen Irrtums.
Unsere Website haben wir mittlerweile aktualisiert.
Wir danken fuer Ihr Interesse und bitten noch einmal, unseren Fehler zu entschuldigen.
Bitte antworten Sie nicht auf dieses Schreiben, da die E-Mail-Adresse nur zur Versendung, nicht aber zum Empfang von E-Mails eingerichtet ist.
Freundliche Gruesse
Kundenservice Amazon.de
http://www.amazon.de
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