Pop access to gmail.

Cool – I now have pop3 access to gmail AND I can have my email forwarded to another account. Not really sure why I’d want to do that though with all this 1gb of space to play with. (jk). The pop3 access will be really handy though as it is much easier to check with a pop3 client than use the web browser or gmail notifier. The pop3 access will also make it easier to check multiple gmail accounts as the various gmail notifier programs that previously existed didn’t seem to like swapping between accounts very often.
Oh – and if you haven’t got access to pop then don’t moan at me, its a phased implementation.

Just how hard is it to buy a laptop?

I’ve been looking around trying to find a laptop, as cheap as possible but with a decent spec – probably around the £500 mark (plus the dreaded vat) and £100 for office. I had shortlisted it down to a dell, acer or samsung and Hi-grade. I’ve only had favourable experiences on the samsung, having used 2 of other peoples, heard horror stories of dell (but they are so big,disasters are likely to occur occasionally) and acer, a reseller friend says they are a lot better than they were 6 years ago when we purchased 4 and all 4 had to go back for repair (and only 1 still works). Higrade won a recent laptop comparison in PcPro. And scarily, this is the narrowed down selection. I know Neil commented about the Ferrari Acer and said it was really expensive, but like the car and the rest of the fashion world you are paying for the name (and in this case the bright red flash and a prancing horse).
Anyway, I sent an email to higrade, querying the price and a week and a half later I’ve not heard anything. Trying to determine which of the acer laptops are cheap is impossible when you look at their laptop site.They have 22 models all with buzz/marketing words describing them, but none telling you which are the budget laptops or the differences between them without looking at the individual pages, 1 by 1. Could you tell the difference between “advancing the innovation of ultraportability”, “widening multimedia connectivity”, “unwired innovation”, “streamline your unwired world” and “mobilize your workplace”? At least 4 of those imply wireless networks and not a lot else to choose between them.
So I settled on the Samsung and saw two good deals on the simply website. However both descriptions say that wireless is an option but don’t really say whether it is included(it does if you look closely) and both say that you can have xp home OR pro but the price is only for home. A quick email to [email protected], their published contact and email address, asking for more details returns the response “Thank you for you email and thank you for choosing Simply Computers. Unfortunately we are unable to answer sales enquiries via email. ” I’ve left the spelling mistake in on purpose. What I really can’t understand is why publish a sales@ email address if you are not going to answer the queries and if you are going to send back a form letter, then at least make sales@ an autoresponder so that I don’t have to wait 2 days to get the reply! They do then give me the option of ringing their (national rate) phone number to place an order. Sorry Simply, but thats simply not good enough customer service.
grrrrrrr

Test drive

We went and had a test drive of a Daewoo car this morning. The main reason for this was that we had heard an advert on the radio where the first 1000 people to take a test drive would get a free digital radio. Sounded a great offer so we sent off the sms text message to apply and had a test drive today. The car wasn’t bad although the boot (trunk) was pretty small and would certainly not be big enough for all the junk/work/caching gear we keep in the back of our car currently.
Although its extremely unlikely we’d actually get a new car the garage itself was a nice experience. There was no pressure to buy a car and they let us drive the car without a salesman in the back seat. The weird thing is that they didn’t ask for any id, proof of insurance or anything so we could have done anything to the car. Still they did seem to be organised and more customer orientated as opposed to the lousy peugeot garage that I currently have to go to where you take your car in for a service and then have to go back the following day as they haven’t turned off the “service needed” indicator.