I tried to buy a new laptop last
night. The one Chris has been using
still uses an operating system that no longer exists as far as the folks at
Windows are concerned. It’s at least
three generations old. We bought it
right after Hurricane Ike, so that would make it about seven years old … a
veritable dinosaur of the technology realm.
The one I use is not quite that old, and since most of our photos are
stored on it (as well as on an external hard drive), she will take over use of
this one and we’ll get a new one for me to use for work stuff. Well, at least that was the plan.
I went onto the HP website. That’s how we got the one I’m using. It was simple enough last time. Choose the one you want. Personalize it with whatever extra oomph you want
to put in, like more memory or storage or specific software you want
preloaded. They put it all together for
you right there and ship it to you. They
usually have online offers to take advantage of, and they even offer six months
to pay with no interest. Hard to beat if
you’re going to buy something anyway. Just
a few clicks of the mouse and you’re done, right? Well …
The first part of the process went really
well. I waded through the options and
finally came up with one that we would be happy with. It even came with Windows 7 instead of
Windows 8, a plus from what intelligence I have been able to gather. 6 gigs of RAM and 750 gigs of storage. Office 2013 preloaded (I would still need to
get Publisher separate, or transfer my weddings and funerals into a different
format). Intel processor. DVD writer.
All in all, a pretty good, basic unit.
I pushed the button to move on to the shipping screen. Another plus.
Free standard shipping. Can’t
beat that price. I clicked to move
forward to the payment screen. Since we
have ordered from them before, all our info was still there, so that was easy
enough. Finally I pushed the button to
go to the last section … payment. There the
options were: pay with credit card, pay later (the option we used last time –
six months, no interest), or pay pal. I
selected the second choice and pushed the “continue” button. And nothing happened. The screen wasn’t locked up. I could still go to other places within the
website. It simply would not take me any
farther. In other words, it would not
make the sale, seal the deal. I even got
one of those online specialists who talk to you on the screen in real
time. She had a difficult time with
English as her second language. I could
tell by her sentence structure and grammar in general. Seemed very nice. Not very helpful, but nice. While we were talking a message suddenly
popped up on my screen, asking me to try again later. Said they were having trouble with the
order. I typed in that I would indeed
try later. That’s when she went into her
sales pitch for some kind of insurance packet I needed to buy along with the
computer. If I would just tell her which
computer I was interested in, she would get me the right packet. Not happening. My first inclination was to reply that I would
just head over to the Apple website and see if they had something I could work
with. I almost did it, too, but Chris
was with me. She often stifles these
urges I have. Great to be married to a
conscience, you know? Ah well. No new computer yet.
Proverbs 20:28 says, “Love and faithfulness keep a king safe; through love his throne is
made secure.”
Father, help us through yet another journey
into the world of technology. It can get
daunting. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment