Dear Dell,

As indicated previously in this blog, I bought a video card that was sold as a 256MB, but in fact it only has 128MB of memory onboard - and it steals the other 128 from the system memory through the video driver.

Unfortunately, in Vista this trick doesn’t work.

There are a few people who have commented about this same problem on my blog, and on your forum.

Tonight I spent about 2 hours with one of your tech support reps. The guy was great, but in the end there was no good resolution. He had me reseat the video card, reset the NVRAM, reinstall the driver twice - and of course none of it worked.

He said he spoke to his manager, and apparently this is a known issue. One that you have received a lot of reports on - for both ATI and nVidia cards.

No kidding - is it because you bury the fact that the 256MB is actually just 128MB in a footnote? Is it because you sell ATI cards with HyperMemory, and nVidia cards with TurboCache - which means “only half the memory advertised”?

The tech rep claimed that a new driver would be available in 2-3 weeks max which would fix this problem. I’ll be sure to check back.

The tech support call I generated tonight probably cost you $10-20. I think you charged me about $50 for this card. There might be another call in about 2-3 weeks if the driver doesn’t work. I’m sure other people have called as well.

Is charging $50 extra for a video card that doesn’t actually have the memory it claims to have (albeit noted in a footnote on a subpage), resulting in customer dsat and support incidents (which cost you money) really a good way to make money?

-Dennis

Usually I post comments about companies and their poor customer service. To change up the karma on this blog, I figured I’d try to post more positive things.

With that in mind, I currently recommend Silicon Valley Auto Body for auto repairs.

As readers may recall, earlier this year I got into a fender bender. A month later, it was repaired. (Before and after pics.)

Silicon Valley Auto Body did a great job - especially with the paint job. You really can’t tell this car has been repaired as the paint match was absolutely amazing. The car drives great. Since they are with AAA Direct Repair Network, there were no insurance hassles.

Now, the negatives: they promised to call me twice a week to let me know the status of the repair, but in reality they didn’t call once. They took a long time to repair my car (they claim parts came in late - I could see that, but some of their “what we’re doing next” statements sort of slip slided.)

As an aside, while I was there I saw a brand new 2007 Mini. Apparently BMW of Mountain View sends them cars to repairs. I won’t go into more details - but suffice to say, next time I buy a new car, I’ll be sure to ask “Has this new car been repainted? Has this new car been repaired? Has this new car gone through any body work?”

Silicon Valley Auto Body can be found here:

Silicon Valley Auto Body
327 E. Weddell Drive
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
408-747-0500

There’s only one thing that regularly cracks me up - The Onion.

And now, it looks like they’re going to start producing web videos under the guise of ONN: Onion News Network.

Here’s a promo:

The other day I had some downtime, so I decided to customize the Quick Access Toolbar in Outlook 2007 to improve my efficiency:

Sweet! Now I can flag an email as low importance, flag as high importance, check names in the To/CC fields, switch between plain text and HTML, left justify, center justify, show the BCC field, change the font name/size/color/highlight, and even delete the mail.

How convenient!

Even better, I found out that these customizations are stored on your hard drive as .QAT files! You can find them here:

C:\Users\[your user account]\local settings\Microsoft\Office

Sweet! I went and customized Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as well, copied their QAT files to a FolderShared folder, and then copied the customizations to all my machines.

I feel more productive already.

I love gadgets that reduce the complexity and overhead of my life. I don’t need any more “scenarios enabled” - except the scenario of “reduce the amount of maintenance in my life.”

It’s one reason why I’m glad my car uses synthetic motor oil, even though it costs dramatically more. Fewer trips for service!

Here’s something I’m a big fan of right now: Lithium AA batteries!

Now, there’s nothing new about lithium batteries - they’ve always been around for cameras. But they were always super pricey and… well… that funny size for cameras.

Now Energizer is selling lithium batteries in the AA (and AAA) format. They’re still pretty pricey at nearly $2 per battery, but the longevity and shelf life is awesome. You can find them at Target, Walmart, etc. Here are some of the places I use them:

• the Microsoft Wireless Mouse that I keep in my backpack all the time. There’s nothing worse than pulling out the mouse, and finding that its battery is dead. And now, this model of mouse has awesome power management so it lasts even longer. Double sweet!
• my travel electric toothbrush.
• my travel oral irrigator. (I’m somewhat paranoid of having cavities…)
• my awesomely bright flashlight.

Another positive of these batteries is that they’re lighter than regular AA batteries. Sure it’s not significant, but every bit adds up when you’re traveling!

I saw this video today, and this quote from Jim Cramer at around 5:08 simply blew my mind:

“What’s important when you’re in a hedge fund mode, is to not do anything remotely truthful. Because the truth is so against your view that it’s important to create a new truth.”

My jaw literally dropped. It gets even… better?… after that.

At the risk of becoming a clone of ThisIsBroken, here’s another fun e-mail I got today. This one is from Citibank’s ThankYou network - a point reward system for using their financial products.

So let me get this straight… it’s the middle of March, and you’re sending me my points balance as of February 1st?

Dear Intuit,

I’m sorry to keep posting these comments about your customer service - but it’s really quite strange. And you make it hard to contact you!

For example, I appreciate that you want my feedback. That’s great! But when you say this (see parts I underlined in red)…

Then I generally don’t expect to see this when I scroll to the bottom:

(No, it’s not clickable.)

I guess the only thing you want me to do is remove myself from getting asked for feedback anymore.

2007-03-14 Update:

Bob Meighan of TurboTax followed up with me on this, and after some research it turns out that this did not render due to a change in Microsoft Outlook 2007. It looks like if I had read this in Yahoo Mail or GMail or Hotmail, this would have apparently correctly as a web form.

Unfortunately, further compounding my problems is that the web interface I use for personal e-mail (http://fastmail.fm) rendered the form incorrectly:

Pretty ironic that my 2 main e-mail clients rendered this incorrectly. I need to spend more time moving my personal mail story over to Hotmail. In any case, mystery solved for now.