Once upon a time, if you RMA'd a Western Digital hard disk and they didn't have the same disk in stock, they would ship you the next better drive. I don't know if this was exactly etched in stone or if it was just the way they did things, but those days are now gone.
If you are using the GNOME interface and have the Serpentine audio CD-producing program installed, try this fun trick. (I'm doing this on Ubuntu Gutsy; things may look slightly different depending on versions and distributions.)
If you want a road sign font, you can pay $800 (for the full set) or you can make your own. You also have several other options like Blue Highway or the roadgeek fonts, although the latter is often criticized for being poorly put together (badly authored.) The creator of that set simply traced the existing fonts. I have no idea why, because you can download the "Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices" which contains all the outlines.
Today, the UPS man brought two packages, as HP made good on their promise of replacements within 24-48 hours. As promised, my replacement battery was in one of the packages. In the other was another incorrect power supply of the same type as the last. I have now spent over two hours (over several days, even) getting a replacement power supply for my warranted, business-class HPQ laptop.
In the ongoing saga of My Compaq nw9440 laptop, the DC power cable coming from my power supply developed a break and subsequently caused the repeated full draining of my battery, which will now not charge above 49%. So I decided to try the online chat system and see if it works on Firefox/Linux - which, amazingly, it does. I tried to use it less than a year ago and was rebuffed, so I took this to be an encouraging sign. You'd think that by this point in my life, I would know better...
In the world of computers there are innumerable small devices which cost practically nothing to make and which typically cost a ton of cash when you buy them retail, especially adapters and cables. The internet has driven down the price of such devices by making them more readily available, and you can get widgets to adapt all kinds of signals into all kinds of other signals. Still, there are low prices, and there are really low prices, and there are really low prices with no shipping charges, which brought me to DealExtreme. The story, unfortunately, is not entirely a happy one.
The following is an alternate version (a bit more wordy) of a review I wrote for travelpost about a visit to Comfort Inn at 5370 Clayton road in Concord, CA.
My lady stayed in this place and said she hated it, but we tried to get a place up the road and all the rooms were booked. It must have been because everyone else knew about this place, because it's Feb. 20th and nothing special is going on here. This is by far the LOUDEST hotel I've stayed in, which includes venues in Santa Cruz and Las Vegas. Outside noise is absolutely intolerable, and because of the neighborhood this place is in you can expect to hear loud engines, tires screeching, and horns honking all night (I did.)
This is not, repeat not an ad for any particular auto parts website. This is a condemnation of Kragen, Napa, and other such auto parts stores. Especially Napa because I extra-special hate them, but really, they all have to pay.
These days it seems like there's an infinite number of laptop brands to choose from - perhaps staffed by an infinitude of monkeys. Actually, based on my experiences with laptops and the lack of quality of their hardware, this seems like a fairly generous estimate - I would actually place the average engineer somewhere down around slime molds. Having now owned and worked on laptops from most major vendors (and a number of minor ones) I have a few observations to offer - especially in light of today's labor.