The City of Mountain View is pretty good about responding when you e-mail them. The other day I wrote about the awful traffic on Shoreline… this is the response I got today:

Good Morning Dennis,

Thank you for your e-mail regarding the operation of the traffic signal at Shoreline Boulevard and Pear Avenue. The signal has been operating on fixed time recently because trenching for the recycled water project on Pear Avenue went through the detector loops for the traffic signal. The work on Pear Avenue has been completed and new detector loops were installed yesterday. Signal operations at Shoreline/Pear should be improved next week. If you would like to discuss this further, please contact me.

Thanks again,
Mike Vroman, P.E.
Traffic Engineer
City of Mountain View
Public Works Department

Hurray!

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