Acer Aspire One

Well, I did it. I’ve made my mind up and purchased a Netbook. And as you can tell from the title, I plumped for an Acer Aspire One – Windows XP, 120GB hard drive, 1GB memory. It’s excellent and the battery and keyboard are better than I expected¹.

Only downsides found so far – no disks are provided, so there’s no way of restoring Windows  in the case of a drive failure, and there’s an annoying occasional flicker when using it off batteries².  But these are minor issues.

I bought it from Tesco – via Quidco and with my Clubcard to get maximum returns. And, like the picture, I bought the white one. I’ve also ordered a cheap mouse from Play.com and a nice leather case from Proporta.

1. in fact, I’m typing this blog entry on the Acer [↩]
2. it’s a known problem caused by the power drain [↩]

Ah, barely into October and I’m discussing Christmas already. Well, if Tesco can set up an entire aisle of Christmas snacks then, yes, I can.

We went shopping tonight and because of the aforementioned aisle we’ve started our Christmas shop. Organised, yes, and damn useful. Every week we buy a couple of items we’d normally buy for Christmas – snacks, food items to go towards the Christmas meal, drinks, Christmas tree decorations, advent calendar, etc. And by trickle buying it we hardly notice it in the budget. Oh, and you avoid the last minute rush later on with a sense of self-satisfaction¹.

Having said all that, I can’t see the point of the Mince Pies which go out of date in November. Or the Cheese Footballs (a Christmas essential) that only last until the end of December. Some things have to be bought later.

But we did come back with some After Eights and an individual Christmas Pudding (my wife doesn’t like them).

1. And smugness [↩]

According to a news article on the BBC website, Tesco are to change the wording of the “10 items or less” to make things clearer. Instead, it will now state “Up to 10 items”.

Now, is it me or is that actually even MORE confusing? Does that mean you shouldn’t use it if you have 10 items? Or does it mean up to and including 10? At least with 10 items or less this wasn’t an issue.

No, the sign is being changed because of those ever-increasing pedants who have complained about the linguistic correctness of the original.

So, something that made sense and was totally clear is now being changes for something that now isn’t quite as clear.

Well done Tesco.

Ok, an update on an earlier post (I’d add it to the string of comments but people tend to look less at these in preference to new posts).

A few weeks ago I reviewed the King of Shaves Azor – their new mens razor. I mentioned it was sharp even after a couple of months use and, in a follow-up comment, how it’s still so sharp I kept cutting myself on it. Anyway, I got a comment from Will King, found and SEO of King of Shaves. Of course, I was sceptical – like it was REALLY going to be him.

He said there had been a faulty batch of blades, and asked me if I’d return mine. So I emailed him, using the King of Shaves email that he supplied. And you know what? It was him.

He’s now given me a freepost address to send the cartridge (that’s the razor head) back to. In kind return, he says they’ll return 4 new ones.

Personally, I just thought it was sharp and not faulty. I’ll be interested to know if mine was a faulty one or if I’m simply prone so cutting myself – having said that I’ve had to go back to my Gilette for a while to allow my cuts to heal (the Gilette is so blunt in comparison it doesn’t really bother them).

As soon as I know anything, I’ll post back.

But, again, another great story of customer service – at this rate I’ll have positive stories than negatives. But then again, there’s always Tesco…

Today I received 3 emails from Tesco, the first at 5am. And only 3 days since I replied to them. A new record.

Thank you for your email

We would like to offer our sincere apologies for the delay in reply. Unfortunately, we have experienced technical difficulties which have resulted in a number of our responses not being sent.

All customer contact is incredibly valuable to us and we understand how frustrating this must be. We are currently working on these issues. You will shortly receive our original reply to your enquiry.

Thank you for your patience.

Then, 3.5 hours later…

Thank you for your email.

I just want to let you know that your email has successfully reached us, and we promise to be back in touch as soon as possible.

Thank you.

So, now we have 2 replies, neither of which say much other than to say they’re GOING to reply to me. Why do they do this close to when they do reply? Wouldn’t this kind of response be more appropriate not long after I’ve emailed them, to “set expectations”?

Now, if you remember, my reply was to go into detail about the IE 7 pop-up issue on their website. I didn’t have to, but I did. 3 hours ago I got my third mail of the day…

Thank you for your reply.

I would like to thank you for your comments regarding “The OK Button”

We find all customer feedback valuable as this helps us when we are looking at ways to make our service better. I would like to assure you that I have fully logged the points you have made. These will be directed to the correct area of the business.

Thank you for taking the time and trouble to share your views with us.

So, have they told someone? God only knows. However, the fact that they define it as a “view” does trouble me. I’m pointing out a god-damn failure of your online ordering system, you fools.

I did some testing of the site with Opera and Safari and that seemed ok. So, it only breaks in IE7. And Firefox. Which, by my reckoning, means their site works quite successfully for 33% of people, a figure they can be proud of.