My new laptop
2004-09-24 22:22 - Tech
I meant to write about this a week ago, but never had the chance. I bought a "new" laptop. It's a Dell Inspiron 8200 and overall it's quite nice. Has a built in CD writer/DVD reader, has 640mb of ram and 1.8ghz processor. Best of all it's got a 1400x1050 resolution 15" screen. All is not perfect though. I quoted new because though it's new for me, it is a used machine. It's got a bit of a dark spot near the middle of the screen that I'll probably have to live with. It's missing the screw that secures the hard drive tray shut.
The seller claimed that it came with a "phenomenal software bundle" but it just came with Windows and Office. He also forgot to ship it. Four days after I paid, I asked him what the tracking number was. He responded that he shipped promptly and paid the UPS store to profesionally ship and pack it, and just forgot to tell me. I paid on the 5th of September, and got that answer on the 9th. When I got it, the tracking number didn't work. The next day, it worked and show the thing was just shipped on the 9th. Harumph.
The bright side is I found out that it had an empty MiniPCI slot available, ripe for a wireless card. I shopped around a bit, found them mostly in the $30-50 range, often with hefty shipping charges on top of that. Then, voila! I found a nice brand new unit, straight from Dell on their website, for $26 plus $5 shipping. I went to order it and oh no! Their site wasn't working properly. So I gave them a ring. Gave the guy my tag number for the computer and the part number of the card I had seen. He came back and said that card wasn't compatible with this machine. I was thinking, "Baloney!" the whole time. Then, he came back and told me a compatible card would cost three times as much, and I quickly denied. Later the website was working again, so I ordered the card I was originally considering. Long story short, it works perfectly, as I knew it was, and that guy at Dell was an idiot.
