My laptop (the one I was using up until yesterday) is ten years old. It's showing signs of age and, frankly, I wanted something that was a little faster.
So I went into a blue store of electronical stuff that, for the sake of this piece, I'll call "Great Purchase". For under $600, I found two that might work. Both were HPs. One had a 14" screen and a 1Tb HDD. The other had a 128 Gb SSD and a 15.4" screen. Both had 8Gb of RAM
I called the duty sales dude and said: "I want one of these (pointing to the 15.4"), but I want it with a 1Tb HDD like this one (pointing to the 14"). Do you have anything like that?"
Sales guy: "No, we don't have one."
Me: "Does Great Purchase carry one like I want?"
Sales guy: "No. But you can get one from HP, probably."
Smooth fucking move, people. Tell a customer with a handful of Benjamins to, essentially, frell off and go elsewhere.
So I went online. You will not be surprised, Gentle Reader, that Great Purchase, indeed, had the very machine that I wanted. If the sales idiot had done his job, he could have gotten it in and sold it to me, with a protection plan and who knows what else. I bet he could have sweet-talked me into having them transfer all of the data files.
But you know who else had the same machine and for less? HP. And HP allowed me to customize it however I desired. So I ordered one with with both drives-- the SSD which I am using for programs and the HDD which is holding the data (and I upped the RAM to 12 Gb). And the protection plan was cheaper.
I should not be surprised. I had the exact same fucking experience with them ten years ago. This is the first time since then that I've tried to buy something expensive from them since then and, other than having different idiots walking the floor, nothing's changed.
But yeah, this thing is fast. It's nice, once I yanked off a bunch of "trial use" crap. I'm not done there.
UPDATE: How to remove a lot of the embedded crap on a Win 10 box.
UPDATE 4/11/19: I had to use the old laptop because reasons. Gawd, is it fucking slow!
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4 comments:
That's why I use Amazon. You might want to think about another 8gb if you're Win10.
I work at A big box, also fond of the color blue. The department manager probably knows which computers are available, and maybe two associates, but the other people who work in the department? Not so much. Corporate has cut back on hiring, hours, training, etc. Despite claims about their "commitment to customer service," they have made it difficult for employees to actually serve the customer. You have more information available to you in your smartphone than most employees have in the store. Heck, when customers ask me questions, sometimes I have to Google it. I suspect Great Purchase has similar conditions. After all, the purpose of retail is not to provide goods and services to consumers, but to Hoover as much cash out of the business as possible, and leave an empty shell. Welcome to Circuit City, where service is state of the art!
Mike, I need 20Gb of RAM to run Win 10?
My laptop gets along on 8GB, but a whole lot of disk swapping goes on...and no SSD, so it's a slow machine. It's my first Asus machine, after two HP's died with unrepairable cooling failures, but I think I'm gonna go back next time.
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