Two Flies in Good Ointments
1. Despite some bad experiences recently with their customer support, I like Dell’s computers. And their prices are now officially insane: I paid $360 for a 2gH machine with 256MB RAM, 40GB drive, and all the accoutrements except a monitor. But, a few days after placing the order, Dell called. Because I’d placed it as a small business (businesses don’t get much smaller than me), they said the PATRIOT Act now requires them to get my federal ID number. Since I was on the road, that slowed down the process by a week. But that’s not what bothers me. The Feds are now tracking us when we buy computers? Guilty as charged!
2. I am a fan and booster of X1 (formerly Find), a desktop indexer that I use every day to find messages in my stack of 77,000 and to find documents in my multiple gigabytes worth. Great product and I recommend it with only one reservation: X1 insists on loading its index into RAM so that it can do the gimmicky thing of showing you hits even as you’re typing in the letters of your query. Cool little marketing demo, but not actually useful. Plus, it takes up 117MB of RAM in my case. I wish they’d put in a switch to make that optional.
And now for a fly in a not very good ointment: TigerDirect’s extended warrantee support continues to suck. A month later and I still haven’t been shipped the box in which I can ship my laptop in for repair. Aaarrgh.
