Screwed By Radio Shack

Vero Beach

Boy was I frosted this morning.  Last Friday I went shopping for a new laptop.  I went late in the morning to avoid the Door Buster crowds (I'm too old for that stuff.)  Good thing that I did. I heard that people camped out for 48 hours at Best Buy to get the deals.  Anyhow, I didn't find anything attractive, so I shopped online.

After several sights offering good deals said "out of stock", I found a nice reconditioned Toshiba computer at radioshack.com.   It said, "in stock".  I called and ordered it through their 800 phone number.  I even paid extra for overnight shipping.   Today, Tuesday, 4 days later, I got an email from Radio Shack.  It said that my order was delayed and if they didn't ship it by January 1, 2011, that it would be cancelled.  What bad sercvice.   I called again to cancel the order and to give them a piece of my mind.   Would you believe that the man I talked to admitted that Radio Shack doesn't have a real time inventory system.  Boy, that's unforgivable for a technology company in this day and age.   I'll never shop online at Radio Shack again.

So, what did I do. I went to Best Buy.  There I found this Samsung netbook computer for $279. I bought it.  I also bought an external DVD drive to use with it for $60.  I also bought a 2 year extended warranty that provides repairs for all hazards, including spills (i.e. water) and screen cracking.  That cost $140.  My total bill was $500.

This new computer is sweet.  It's so small and so light compared to my 4 year old Acer.   Still better, it claims to have up to 9 hours of battery life, compared with up to 2 hours on the Acer.  It should be much less power hungry when charging it up on the boat.

It only took me a few minutes back on the boat to get the new computer turned on, and connected to the Internet tethered to my Droid phone as a modem.   Then I was in for a shock.  Browsing the web was horribly slow.  It was so slow, that I couldn't log in to my google account before the login page timed out. Did I make a horrible mistake?  Could netbook computers be to slow compared to my 4 year old Acer?  

To resolve it, I changed base.  I'm at the local Publix store using their WIFI.   The first thing I did was to download and install the Google Chrome browser and to use that instead of Microsoft's Intenet Explorer 10.   Now the speed is just fine.  I have two theories why.  The netbook has only 1GB of memory; and perhaps IE10 needs more than 1GB to run.   Theory 2: it is another one of the stupid browser wars.  IE10 seemed to work fine going to a microsoft web site or to bing.com, but it was horrible trying to connect to anything Google.  I suspect foul play.   In any case, I'm fine now.