Lean Left

« Previous | Next »

More Product Plugging
Posted by KTK

I had another major computer disaster this past week, and still haven’t resolved it. I’ve lost days of work, and possibly completely tanked one important project. I finally completely lost my shit and awoke from a trance to find myself standing in my living room vigorously miming punching Bill Gates repeatedly in the face while making little grunting noises. (Tgirsch had some smart remarks to make about that but I think it’s perfectly understandable.)

So I took the plunge and decided to set up a Linux system - all the caveats notwithstanding. From what I know, the current Ubuntu distros are stable and offer a choice of usable GUIs. Still a few bugs in the system, but wireless Internet (Tgirsch’s concern) is not my current problem. My biggest worry was MS Word compatibility - I like Open Office despite its slightly weird interface, but it really only emulates Word about as well as any “emulator” does, meaning that formatting gets significantly futzed when you move files from one to the other, as I often have to do. But when Windows ate its own registry and refused to boot - and MS’s Web site confidently encouraged me to copy the old registry file onto the corrupted one to fix the problem, not stopping to realize that you’d have to boot the computer to do it!*, I just gave up. Anybody who wants to trust themselves to Word and the rest of Bill Gates’s demonspawn is welcome; I’m bugging out.

So I started looking around. A friend suggested to me Everex’s new $200 Linux computer - a decent system at an outstanding price. It retails through WalMart, whom I didn’t want to patronize, and also through an outfit called ZaReason, who build customized Linux systems at good prices. But when I checked ZaReason’s Website, I immediately got seduced by the slightly higher-priced systems they build themselves, which are much more powerful than the Everex. I couldn’t find quite what I wanted so I e-mailed their tech support address, and got a response (on the weekend!) from their CTO himself. (I suspect he’s actually the entire tech-support office, but that’s still awfully good service.) He made some useful suggestions and alerted me to an upcoming offer they were just about to release that would be an even better deal than what I had been looking at. I thought that was great, and got ready to order one.

By coincidence, however, while I was waiting for the new deal to show up on ZaReason’s Website, I stumbled across a discount ad from Dell. This week only, they’re offering $350 off any “Inspiron 531″ system retailing for $1,000 or more (go here, configure the system however you like, and enter discount code 4J1M7748R2RRV6 at checkout; you also get free shipping and a $100 gift card for future purchases). By judicious juggling of product options, I was able to put together a screaming system that far outpaces the ZaReason configuration and comes with a boatload of accessories and peripherals as well. Of course, it also comes with Windows Vista, and they won’t preinstall all the Linux OS and apps that ZaReason loads to your specifications for you for free. Too bad. But it’s got a huge hard drive, so I figure I can partition it and set up a dual-boot system, thus still being able to boot to Windows if I absolutely have to, but with lots of room for Linux as a main configuration. And, the 19″ flat-screen that comes with it is selling on eBay for over $150, and I already have a better monitor of my own, so, I see a way I can recoup almost a quarter of the expense of this system, coming out within $50 of ZaReason’s price for a much more powerful setup.

It also means I’ll have to install Ubuntu and all the apps myself, so if you don’t hear from me for a few days, send somebody by my apartment to make me stop shadowboxing and screaming “Torvalds! I’ll kill you! . . . “. But that’s not what I wanted to write about.

I actually felt guilty not buying the Linux vendor’s system, and I e-mailed the CTO guy back to thank him for his input and explain the special offer Dell was making, and ask if he thought I was overlooking anything by not buying from him. I assumed he’d give me some line about “build quality” or something, but in fact he wrote back and said flat-out that it was a good deal, and that if I thought I could handle the install myself, it was a better system than they were offering for the price.

I thought that was very honest and fair, and was impressed. After dithering around a bit more and comparing options, I finally bit the bullet and bought the Dell system - paying (of course) a good bit more than I’d originally intended, but coming away with a hell of a lot of computer for the money. Out of some weird sense of loyalty I wrote back to the ZaReason guy again, thanking him again for his input and explaining that I’d felt I couldn’t pass up the Dell offer, but that it had been a close call. I didn’t expect to hear back from him, but I wanted him to know I had regard for his company. I also didn’t expect him to care what one single customer did, or why.

Today I got another e-mail back from him, congratulating me on getting a good deal and suggesting a Website I could go to for help in doing the Linux installs! Yep - he wrote me a goodwill note for buying someone else’s product, just because I got a good deal, and then went out of his way to be helpful in getting it set up!

Now, that is just too goddam cool. Go buy something from them.

*No, I didn’t have a backup, or a boot disk.**

**Yes, I think installing and configuring a complete Linux system from scratch should be perfectly simple for someone with no experience who’s too dumb to make a Windows boot disk.

November 20th, 2007 General, Economics, Technology | 5 comments