Category: Internet & Technology

Know what that’s a picture of? Three absolutely flawless Dell 2407WFP, 24″ LCD monitors. Each capable of glorious 1920 x 1200 resolution, and all three are perfect with no dead or stuck pixels. I received two of them yesterday, and quite frankly after my completely hellish experience with these monitors, when I un-boxed the two new ones yesterday I was expecting them to also be flawed. Somehow though, as I carefully set each one up, I had a small glimmer of hope that because they took so long to get here (about two weeks) maybe they came from the non-crappy factory. I powered up each one, ran some full-screen dead pixel tests, along with a colour banding test, and each was flawless. FLAWESS. I’m so happy this insane quest is finally done.

Sadly, I don’t have anything to connect them to yet – I’m still waiting for the Velocity Micro system to come back to me, and ditto for my XFX 7600GS for the Shuttle, so I can’t run dual monitors on that unit yet either. I’m hoping that by the end of the week all the pieces will have arrived and I can put my technology world back together again.

Now just you watch – in a month I bet all three Dell monitors will spontaneously die on me. 😆

I’ve owned the kensai.com domain for a very long time – since 1997 – and early on no one knew it wasn’t a good idea to put email addresses in plain text on a Web site, postings in Usenet forums, or sign up for newsletters and forums with your real email address. This was before the era of spam harvesting bots. Over the years the level of spam got to be so high I changed my real email address from [email protected] to [email protected]…but even that wasn’t enough to stop all the spam to the domain. The domain is so old it’s practically “spam tainted”. About a month ago I set up the domain email to forward all email to a Gmail account…and the screen shot above is showing how much spam has flooded in over the past month or so. 129,000+ messages…! What’s amazing is that 99.9999% of it is spam, and this shows that Google’s spam blocking is having a hard time with it seeing as 25% of the messages are still in the Inbox and not the spam folder. Overall I’ve found Gmail’s spam filtering to be quite good, although perhaps in this case it’s just given up. 😉

That’s a picture of the guts of my Shuttle SD11G5 rig – 2 GB of RAM, 2.13 Ghz Pentium M CPU, 16x DL DVD burner, and a 150 GB Western Digital RaptorX drive. Where’s the Shuttle? I had to send it back to Industry City, California, under RMA to get looked at because of that problem with the video cards. So I’ve been using my 17″ widescreen Fujitsu laptop to do all my real work on. My friends sometimes laugh at how many computers I have in my office, but this is one instance where having computing redundancy saved me. The combination of hosted Exchange and FolderShare remains absolutely killer and core to my ability to work on any PC I have configured with those two solutions.

The good news about my Shuttle is that it was shipped back to me as of the 16th, though they use UPS Ground so I won’t see it until the middle of next week. But it’s on it’s way back to me – at which point I’ll slam Vista Ultimate on there. Assuming, of course, that the defective XFX 7600GS video card that I shipped back to XFX is also replaced at some point so I have a video card for the Shuttle. I’ve dealt with more RMAs in the past 30 days than I have in the past year! Oh, and I’m still waiting for those other two Dell 24″ monitors to show up (they’ve shipped, no tracking number yet)…and the Velocity Micro Media Center PC (Velocity Micro is being a bit frustrating with the lack of information about the status of it). Basically my entire technology life is in hold as I wait for all the pieces to come back together again. And this time, hopefully it will all work!

I’ve ordered many products from Dell over the years, and in all the times I’ve used the return policy to send back a product, I’ve only ever returned a product that was defective. In those instances, Dell gives out a UPS shipping coupon that you print out, tape to the box, and ship back at no cost. Today I phoned up Dell to request an RMA for my Zen Vision:W. I decided to return it because it was simply too large – I knew it would be thick, but 26.4mm is more then obese, it’s HUGE. When I said I wanted to return the product, the Dell representative offered me a $70 discount to keep it – making the final price only $300 CAD (I paid $369 CAD including tax). A $70 discount isn’t bad at all, but even at $300 it’s still too big. I didn’t like the controls on it much either. Because I was returning a product I didn’t like, rather than a defective product, I’m on the hook for paying return shipping to Ingram Micro (Dell’s supplier) on Ontario.

So this little experiment with the Zen Vision:W is likely going to cost me about $20 or so (the shipping cost), which isn’t bad. I can’t imagine how expensive it would be if I had ordered a 30″ LCD monitor and didn’t like the results – local stores such as London Drugs will allow me to return products for any reason with 15 days as no cost, which is certainly more appealing than what Dell offers. Something to be wary of in the future!

I’m sometimes baffled at how poorly spell check works – the above screen shot is from Microsoft Word, but they’re not alone: when I was doing up a previous post with the word “movies” in it, that word was flagged as being in error. Who spell-checks the spell checker?

Coming back from CES, it’s amazing how ubiquitous USB flash drives have become – I returned with, get this, 5152 MB of flash memory spread across nine USB flash drives. Two of those were big suckers – Sandisk 2 GB USB Flash drives meant for Vista ReadyBoost use – and the other seven were between 128 MB and 256 MB, used for press releases, high-resolution images, and other content that the press likes to have. Flash memory has certainly hit its stride!

By the time this goes live, I’ll be at a special event that I was asked not to speak about before hand: a lunch with Jim Allchin and members of the Windows Vista team. The invitation was a bit of a surprise, but it’s an honour and I hope I get some face time with the man who drove the Good Ship Vista over the past few years…especially since Allchin has said he’ll be leaving Microsoft after Vista ships. I was initially hoping it would be a really intimate event – half a dozen of us blogger/media types – but I’ve been told it’s more like 25 people coming. Still, that’s not too bad and hopefully there will be an opportunity for some good conversation about Vista.

In my continuing monitor saga, I needed to order two more monitors – earlier in the evening I checked Dell.ca and confirmed that they were still being offered for $699 CAD. At 10:17pm last night, after trying to get that pixel un-stuck and packing up the two defective monitors, I went to order two more. Guess what? The price had jumped back up to $899 CAD! I actually burst out laughing, because it was so comical that after all my efforts that night to salvage one more of the three monitors, I was rewarded with a price jump. It turns out the Dell Web site is on Eastern time (I should have known that, Ontario being the center of the universe in Canada after all) – so 10:17pm my local time was 12:17am Dell time, and the $200 discount was over. Of course, I won’t be defeated that easily! This morning I called Dell to arrange the return of the two defective units – zero hassle. Dell is really great about accepting things back when you’re within those first 15 days. Then I called Dell Online Sales, which is their call centre in India. I spoke to a fell named Abdul, who listened to the basic story (nine monitors ordered in five months, only one good one found) and said he would review my case and phone me back. So I sit here, waiting, hoping that Dell Online Sales will have mercy on me, a poor fool who didn’t realize that on Dell’s Canadian Web site, when it hits midnight at their headquarters in Ontario, that’s the end of the day all across Canada. 😉 I’ll update this after I hear back. Even if Abdul says no, I’ll ask to speak to his manager and continue escalating this.

And for those that are wondering why I haven’t just gone elsewhere for my monitors, the main reason is that I like Dell monitors. I have four Dell monitors in my house now, and with the exception of this ridiculous experience, I’ve had really good results from Dell with their monitors. The $699 price point is also tough to beat – at my local computer store they only have one other 24″ monitor that’s close in price, an Acer that’s $799 CAD. The BenQ is $869 CAD. So for $699, these monitors are impossible to beat. Lastly, at this point my desire to get three perfect Dell 2407WFP’s has attained the status of a holy quest – it’s just something I have to do. And the cynical side of me wants to see how many monitors I have to go through to get three of them that are flawless.

UPDATE: After waiting four hours, I decided to call Abdul back. Turns out he was busy with incoming calls, and when they have a lot of incoming calls, they’re not supposed to call people back. A bit strange. At any rate, he honoured the price of $699 per monitor, I just had to also pay $15 in shipping per monitor. Not a big deal – I’ll pay $15 to learn my lesson of ordering things the second I think I should. Now I wait and see if, when the two monitors show up, they’re actually any better than the others. Come on lucky #10 and #11!

Today I received two packages: one was a couriered bottle of wine from my friends at Vaja (that’s a twist tie stopping it from rolling off my desk if you’re curious). Yes, they really are that friendly – they sponsor contests for us all the time, give us anything we want for review, and are amazingly supportive partners all around. And as a Happy New Year gift, they sent me some wine. This particular swag will be opened and consumed at a dinner with friends.

Next we have something on the other end of the scale: it’s not food related, and it’s all gadget goodness. This is a T-Mobile Dash from a press release event that Janak Parekh went to in New York – I was invited, but I wasn’t about to fly down for one event, so Janak went instead. They gave him a Dash to keep, but he didn’t want to use it and switch back to GSM, so he reviewed it for Smartphone Thoughts then sent it to me. Janak doesn’t like lines, so it took him a couple of months to get it in the mail to me. 😉 But now that I have it, I’m pretty excited because I haven’t used one extensively before – and it’s also my first Smartphone with a keyboard (that’s right, I’ve never owned a Motorola Q, Samsung i320, etc.). It’s SIM-locked to T-Mobile’s network though, so I have to get it unlocked – and all before Friday night when I leave for CES.

My heart is pounding, my throat is dry, my palms are sweaty…no, I’m not looking at one of those Web sites. I’m setting up and testing out the three Dell 24″ LCD monitors that showed up today. For those keeping score, I just went through this last week, so I’m feeling a bit pessimistic about whether or not this is going to work out. Drummer, start that drum roll…

• Monitor 1: Ashley unpacked the box, no missing parts, looks like it’s brand new. No cracked LCD. Plugged it in over VGA (connected to the Fujitsu 17″ laptop). Ran the colour gradient test, no banding – sweet. Ran it through the solid colours…what’s that speck? Augh! NO! Wait…oh, it’s a piece of dust. Checks monitor, nearly blind now from examining it so closely. 100% perfect – no dead or stuck pixels. We have a winner!
• Monitor 2: Looks ok coming out of the box, hooked it up…display comes up. Looking good so far. Fire up the gradient test….AUGH! Stuck pixel in the bottom right corner. Damn damn damn. Fire up Jscreenfix and run it by placing the pop-up window under the dead pixel – not sure if this is an elaborate hoax or prank (I’ve never seen these things be successful before), but it can’t hurt to try. Play with the positions on the monitor a bit while it’s Jscreenfix’n (reminds me of Rubberneckin’), monitor goes down to lowest position, snaps into place – now can’t get it back up. Button on back of monitor is supposed to release it to move up, it’s locked. Press harder. It’s locked. Move monitor down a little more, button releases, monitor is free to move again. Still Jscreenfix’n. [leaves it for 60 minutes] Jscreenfix didn’t do a damn thing, like I thought. Maybe there’s some real science behind it, but it didn’t work for me. Curses.
• Monitor 3: Unpacking it, the monitor looks new, not a re-pack. Good stuff. Hook it all up, power it on. No obvious dead pixels – wait, what’s that in the bottom left corner? It’s a…scratch? It’s not on the upper layer of the monitor, it’s on a layer beneath, so it looks like the actual LCD is damaged. I didn’t even think LCDs could scratch. Well, whatever it is, it’s huge and nasty and not staying in my office.

So there you have it folks: one out of three monitors is good, the other two are going back. Now it doesn’t seem so crazy that I ordered three monitors in three separate orders, does it? For those keeping score, I’ve now had nine of the 2407WFP monitors since I first started buying them in August of 2006, and I’ve just now found my first one that is actually worth keeping. This has now reached comical proportions, so I’m going to keep going down this crazy trail. The price is still $699 CAD, so I’ll be ordering two more and returning these two defective monitors. But at least I have one good one – so even in the pixellated darkness, there is hope…(but Dell, your quality control SUCKS).