This weekend I went home for a dentist appointment (and also to appease my parents), and I figured that this would be the opportune time for me to buy a new computer. My old laptop died about 3 weeks ago, due to some sort of motherboard issue. Basically, the only thing that started up when I pressed the power button was the fan.
Seeing that this weekend was President's Day weekend, I guessed that there would probably be some sales going on. Unfortunately for me, I have not gone computer shopping in a long time, and therefore was not prepared for the pain and sorrow that I ultimately experienced.
On Sunday morning, I looked at the Best Buy ad which displayed an HP laptop for the low, low price of $399. Even though I was loath to purchase another product from the devils that are Hewlett-Packard (my old laptop was an HP and had a long string of problems before its untimely demise), I had to admit that it was a pretty freakin' sweet deal. Alternatively, there was also an Acer laptop on sale for $450. It had essentially the same specs as the HP, but was slightly smaller and more janky looking. But it wasn't an HP. But I also had no idea if Acer made good laptops or not.
Anyway, Sunday afternoon rolled around and I headed out with my parents. Alas, they were sold out of the HP's. This provoked some nagging from my parents about why I shouldn't sleep in. Then the blue-shirted guy told us that they had sold out within the first hour. Bummer.
The other option was to get the Acer. But my mother wasn't very happy that I was spending 50 bucks more on a computer when my only motivation to get it was that they were in stock. I could have gotten a better (and more expensive) computer, but frankly I hate laptops, and I probably won't use a personal laptop after I graduate.
Well then. I was in a bit of a quandary.
After a bit of skulking around the retardedly narrow aisles, I made the semi-impulsive decision to get a desktop instead.
Best Buy had a few deals on desktops around, including a couple tiny ones. The best deal was an Acer that had a tower about 1/3 the size of a normal tower. It had 4GB of RAM, 320GB of hard drive, a reasonably good dual-core Intel Pentium chip, and the $429 package included a keyboard, mouse, and LCD monitor. Awesome! We called over a guy to ring us up.
As we were waiting in line to pay, my dad noticed that the box for the computer had different specs than were advertised... it only had 3GB of RAM, 160GB of hard drive, and (worst of all) an Intel Celeron processor! WTF mates. Turned out that the package deal was for a completely different computer.
In fact, their website had the same misleading deal (which I looked up later that night). Here you can see the awesome package:
But when you scroll farther down, you see that the package overview is different than what it claims as features!
What a gyp. Needless to say, we backed out before we paid for it.
I wasn't really impressed by any of the other packages they had, so we decided to go home and look for something online. I ended up finding a good deal at Costco.com (which, by the way, is completely separate from the physical store). It is an HP, but I'm a little less picky when it comes to desktops. It is also a 1/3-size tower, and I am quite excited about it.
In conclusion, Best Buy sucks; I hate them. That's my story.
