What's made me angry today
It has been a while since I have disclosed my bad mood in print so here are the things that are making me cranky.---Shutterfly, once my favorite photo site, ticked me off big-time over the holidays. I ordered a half-dozen photobooks and received a shipping date well in advance of Christmas. The product, however, keep getting delayed and delayed. My requests for information went unanswed. There was a note on my order history page saying the company was working through “high order volume” and I would just have to wait.
When the books did arrive I found the photos were too small and the books kinda flimsy for the price. The layout options of the books were pretty limited and they can’t be resized.
---Signals, the mail order and Internet company, ticked me off last year and I have not been back since. Same issue...failure to live up to a shipping promise. (Christmas gifts shipped on Dec. 27 aren’t all that welcome.)
I believe in the Southwest Airlines theory of customer serve. Promise little and deliver on your promise. Basically Southwest sets expectations low and generally fulfills those expectations.
---Dell is on the list this year for adding so much junk to their new PCs that it takes a trained technician to remove most of them. Their “starter” edition of Quickbooks is the most annoying...even popping up reminders to try the program long after you’ve deleted it. I know Dell sells 80 percent of its PCs to businesses but there’s no reason to have such an invasive product and selling tactic. Most large businesses don’t use Quickbooks, most small businesses already have it and consumers don’t want it. Editing the Windows Registry should not be needed to remove it. (Dell gets an honorable mention for charging $25 for a USB cable to connect their “free” printers to their computers.)
---Balance Digital Technology, a low-end computer line, gets a rasberry for using a non-standard power supply in their desktop PC then running out of spares. I have had one on my shop bench for a week and it looks like I will have to custom-make one, as the company had a single-source for them and that company quit making them. It’s never a good plan to have a unique form factor.
---More than one person has emailed me claiming because they cannot find the Epson RX700 printer, which I recommended, in their local store so therefore it must not exist. I too politely suggest Google.
---A few people have taken great exception to my recommendation of AVG, a free anti-virus product for Windows and Linux. Some claim nothing free can work, some say it’s spyware and some say it’s inferior. All of those people are wrong. AVG scored 100 percent on the December 2005 Virus Bulletin testing. The reason they can give it away to consumers is that they sell it to businesses.
---I love the people who try to guess my political or social leanings by the Web sites I recommend. I don’t care what the content is; I recommend sites based on many factors. I get called a left wing wacko and a right-wing loonie, sometimes in the same week. It’s pretty interesting.
---I am getting very annoyed that no one has cleaned the Web lately. Lots of the sites I find in search engines no longer exist. I would like a house-cleaning day where we purge all of the search databases and start over. We all ought to have a “do-over” day.
---I also long for the day where the hype of the Internet is over. Every week someone puts up a the next “cool” Web site. He/she gets rich and the site disappears in a year.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: My new favorite site to get software is Filehippo at www.filehippo.com
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company and columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
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