A reader sent in this funny and bizarre customer support email from Creative—it’s a weird combination of broken English, pre-written paragraphs from macros (which, oddly, still have grammatical errors), Byzantine instructions for resetting and reformatting the broken device, and then five attempts to sell other products and services at the end.
repairs
Delete Your Porns: Court Says You Have No Right To Privacy When Your Computer Is Repaired
By 12.20.07
Evidence uncovered by retail store technicians (i.e. kiddie porn), is legally admissible as evidence in court because, “If a person is aware of, or freely grants to a third party, potential access to his computer contents, he has knowingly exposed the contents of his computer to the public and has lost any reasonable expectation of privacy in those contents…,” the Superior Court of Pennsylvania ruled December 5th. The case hinged on the question of whether kiddie porn a Circuit City tech found could be admitted as evidence, overturning a lower court’s decision. The Superior Court of PA also referred to codecs, computer video compression and decompression software, as “code X.”
By 12.15.07
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CompUSA has publicly announced their consumer hotline for repair questions: 1-877-520-8324. (It’s the same as the number in the letters they’re mailing out to customers.) You can also visit a new website, www.compusaconsumerhelp.com. [Dallas Business Journal]
When Should You Buy A Warranty?
By 12.7.07
SmartMoney has added its opinion to the argument of what warrants extended coverage and what doesn’t. Here’s their list of when and why you would want to buy that extended warranty—adjust their advice accordingly based on your own tolerance for risk and your history with dropping and spilling things.
Maybe Landlord Will Fix Ceiling After It Collapses?
By 12.6.07
After ripping down the almost collapsed ceiling and the neighbor’s kitchen floor, the guy discovered at least three different leaks, all converging on my ceiling.
HP Takes Three Months To Repair Laptop, Then Ships It To The Wrong Address
By 12.1.07
Hewlett-Packard took over three months to fix reader Mark’s ailing laptop, which they then shipped to the wrong address. HP charged Mark several hundred dollars for the repairs in July, and gave an expected delivery date of August 5. In early September, Mark was told that the laptop would definitely ship by September 24. On October 10, Mark learned – after sending an email to the CEO and leaving ten messages – that his laptop could not be repaired, and that he would instead receive a new Compaq Presario by October 23. The laptop finally shipped on October 25 to Lavergne, Tennessee. Mark lives in Iowa.
Fix Your Old Christmas Lights
By 11.30.07
Save some money by re-using your existing strings of light this Christmas—even if they’re currently acting all wonky. Here are some handy guides on how to repair dark strings of Christmas lights, whether they’re LED or the classic incandescent type. They’re fairly detailed, with a sort of techy “how things work” vibe, but contain a lot of useful information. For example, just because a string of incandescents has an AC outlet at the end, that doesn’t make it an extension cord—the more power you pull through the cord, the greater the current and the higher the risk of shorting out bulbs.
Why I'm Never Shopping At Sears Again
By 11.27.07
Reader Chris writes the CEO of Sears to let him know why he’ll never step foot inside Sears ever again.
Dear Mr. Lewis,
Attention AT&T: Don't Lie About "Massive Outages," Reporters Have Phones Too
By 11.12.07
When Stephanie the AT&T “escalation affairs administrator” lied to Jan about why her phone couldn’t be repaired for several days, she probably didn’t know what Jan did for a living.
Where To Get Help When Your Gadget Breaks Down
By 11.9.07
When your iPod, Zune, CueCat, HP printer, DVD player, or game console goes on the fritz, you no longer have to put it in that closet where you store all the stuff that doesn’t work but that you don’t think you should throw away. There’s now a whole world of self-help forums and repair advice websites online where you can trade tips with other owners of consumer electronics—weird things companies would never tell you, like using a piece of folded paper as a shim to get a failed hard drive working again in your iPod.
When Shopping In A Port Of Call, Document Your Purchases
By 10.24.07
If you find you’re on a cruise to, say, the Caribbean, and you decide to buy something expensive—like, say, an emerald ring—then be sure to pay with a credit card, take photos of the item and the person who sold it to you, and get a receipt. It may sound like overkill, but if the “emeralds” in the ring fall out and it turns your finger black once you’re back on the boat and have left Antigua, chances are it’s not a cursed pirate ring but a fake, and you’ll be glad you have some documentation when you start trying to make things right.
By 10.18.07
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How to replace a broken laptop LCD yourself. [Instructables]
UPDATE: Girl Accused Of Dropping Apple Laptop Gets New One
By 10.12.07
“This is Stephanie, I emailed you a couple of weeks ago about my MacBook’s cracked screen, and how the manager at Apple in Chestnut Hill was basically the worst person ever.”
PowerBook Explodes, Man's Apple Crush Grows
By 10.10.07
Jimm Lasser went to sleep with his PowerBook sitting underneath his bed, and woke to find it bursting into flames. From the pictures, it looks like there was a battery malfunction.
Man Gets 11 Years After Geek Squad Reports Child Porn On His Computer
By 10.4.07
A man got 135 months in jail and a $10,000 fine after Geek Squad reported the computer he brought in for servicing had child pornography on it.
Sting Op Of 10 Different Computer Repair Companies Finds 70% Don't Know What They're Doing
By 10.4.07
CBC Marketplace did a kickass hidden camera investigation into computer repair companies and found only 30% were able to correctly diagnose their problem.
