16 Sep 2004
Much like my good friend Gringod, I have also had some issues with Dabs.com.
I recently ordered a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and a Lexar Pro CF card which is needed for my holiday. When I had finished the order, I was informed that the memory card was actually out of stock and wouldn’t be available untill about the time I leave to go to Spain. As the holiday was my primary reason for the purchase, I figured that I had better look for an alternative. Since I was already on the Dabs website, I searched for ‘1GB Compact Flash’ and what should show up? The Lexar Pro 1GB card that I had ordered but with 4 in stock… how could that be? On further investigation, I discovered that Dabs have the same product, with the same manufacturers code on two different Dabs stock numbers and a £15 price difference! Whether this was due to different suppliers, alternative dispatch location or just plain old incompetence I dont know but I immediately sent the support team an email explaining that I am about to go on holiday and that I would like to pay the extra money and get the other memory card! I was sent an automated reply stating that they were bogged down with emails and are not quite up to their usual 4 hour response time… I can cope with a couple of hours over that I suppose!!
To get things in perspective, I am not worried about the difference in price, spending money does not bother me in the slightest and £15 is nothing in the big scheme of things. It is certainly nothing compared to the cost of the holiday and what the emotional cost of not having it would be! I am, however, really annoyed by poor service… I couldn’t even find a phone number on their website… this is supposed to be one of the largest and most respected IT suppliers in the world!!! I want things done promptly and as I choose… isn’t that how all things should be in the Internet-age? </apparent over-expectation> If you do need their phone number… Gringod has posted them, though they dont sound like much use.
At this stage, I discovered that it is possible to add and remove items from your order before it has been sent. So after some experimentation, involving the creation and deletion of a few new orders, I finally managed to delete the old memory card and get the ‘in stock’ version added to my order. Success.. the status changed and the payment was being authorised and a few more Dabs points would be on their way! A day later I received a dispatch confirmation email with a Parcelforce tracking number on it. I then proceeded to watch for 2 days as my parcel moved accross England, over the Channel and into Guernsey where it was promptly delivered to my door!
The final part of this story relates to that email which I sent to Dabs support team 3 days before my Parcel arrived. They sent me a reply stating that all the items were out of stock and that I would have to wait for 11 days before they would be available again! Hmm… had I not taken matters into my own hands… neither of my items would have been available!! I thought about using the keyboard to write a response but in the end… I couldn’t be bothered!!
16 Sep 2004
Finally got the Bluetooth hub installed and working properly. My phone has jumped to life and synchronising with the PC… excellent!
If you are having difficulty installing a Logitech Bluetooth desktop because of Windows XP SP2… you need to do the following ;
- Remove all files starting with ‘bth’ from ‘windows/system32/drivers’ and ‘%windir%/inf’ (Type the latter into the Run dialog box)
- Download the latest software from Logitech.
- Connect a PS/2 mouse to the pc, remove batteries from BT mouse.
- Restart and install the downloaded software… reboot
- When Windows has started again, wait while the wizard thinks for a while… eventually a box pops up behind the wizard which requires you to click ‘next’ on… this is why you connected a PS/2 mouse… the Bluetooth hub will not be operating at this point.
- Reboot again and all should be well… put the batteries back in the mouse… get back to the manual and follow the wizard!
Let me know if I should expand on this. I have put it together very quickly!!
14 Sep 2004
The above is a panorama made from 12 stitched photos. I went to Vale Castle during my lunch hour to get the shots. Click the image above to see a QT animation of the full thing. Its 2MB so give it some time to load. Worth seeing if you are interested! The challenge is to spot my car (White Honda Integra Type-R)
14 Sep 2004
Clearly this is why I need to get myself a Mac… the ability to raid floppy disks and memory sticks!
My next phone… the sexy yet weird Motorola RAZR V3… I dont know what Quad band is yet but I know I want it!!
Bluetooth flying robot anyone?? Epson Seiko have one!
14 Sep 2004
Gringod has kindly uploaded all of the photos to my new gallery system. I will get this installed at some point in the very near future. Keep your eyes open though as I am hoping to have a neat blog integration in place. If I do it right… you wont even know it!!! You can see a very basic version here… there is no styling at all yet though so dont expect much!
14 Sep 2004
IrfanView is a free image program that I can now highly reccommend. It has nearly all of the features you might want from your editing software and includes support for plugins, video, slideshows and even command line operations. You should head over to the website and look at what it can do. Thanks Irfan for a great piece of software!
14 Sep 2004
As IBM supply the G5 chip to Apple, does that make Mac’s IBM compatible??
14 Sep 2004
Now I don’t know if it was just a sign from above that I need to clean and tidy my computer area more, but yesterday I received a pleasant surprise for doing just that!! My rear center speaker started working again. It hasn’t emitted so much as a pop since I used a heavy duty electric staple gun to attach/implant the wires cleanly to the ceiling! It seemed quite clear at the time what the issue was and since then, I have been on the verge of taking it down and throwing it away a number of times if I could have been bothered to remove the staples! It is not clear exactly what I did when cleaning to actually solve this problem, but it now works perfectly! It was either the static held in the dust or alternatively, perhaps I just pushed a connection home that was previously loose. The latter seems more likely but very coincidental timing that it stopped and started working at these times.
09 Sep 2004
At last, an opportunity to do something that has about as much use as the time I wired an old hard drive to a stereo amplifier and made it work like a speaker. BoingBoing have linked out to a kernelthread.com article where the authors have managed to load Unix onto a Gameboy Advance… amazing.
