A Lemon?!?!

I briefly mentioned wanting to throw my new computer out the window in my last post. What, so you ask, would make me want to throw a BRAND new computer out the window? Well, here is what happened.

My 6 year old computer started running EXTREMELY slow after I installed 2 photoshop programs into it. When I mean slow, I mean even my pregnant butt could have caught up with it! :-) It would take me 10-15 minutes to edit a photo from a shoot, and that is WAY unacceptable. I would never be able to do more than one shoot a week if I expected to keep up with the editing, and actually expect people to pay me for it.

Foster finally broke down and agreed that it was time I invested in a new computer. He talked to my mentor about what PC to invest in. He said none...and surprisingly told me not to invest in a MAC either. He said the best computer if I really wanted to make this my business was an IBM. A business computer would have enough memory and RAM to run large programs like Photoshop and never slow down. So, that's what we bought. I also had an additional 4GB RAM installed for a whopping total of 12GB!! This baby should NEVER run slowly!!!

Well, I was so excited about receiving my new laptop. I paid the $100 deposit and waited till the custom laptop came in to the shop before authorizing the guy to finish the rest of the transaction. When he called, I gave him the OK. I noticed in my bank account 10 minutes later that he had charged me the full price, and neglected to subtract the $100 deposit. I immediately called the shop. I wanted to see what happened. Well, turns out he forgot about the deposit, charged the full amount, realized he did, and cancelled the transaction. Okay, no problem. Where he screwed us, is he ran the card AGAIN. Now this is a debit card directly to our checking account. The first transaction, although cancelled on his end, could take 30 days to be cancelled in our account. So we had two LARGE pending transactions in our account that prevented us from using that money. Now, financially we were fine, but it still ticked me off that the guy would not think this COULD have caused a problem! COMMON SENSE!!

That was strike one. Strike two was when I finally got the laptop home. I plugged it in, and it would not turn on! I tried and tried, but was getting no power to it. I tried different outlets, made sure the outlets were working by testing other electronics, made sure all the "male and female parts" were matching up and completely engaged, and finally tried 3 times to reinsert the battery. I don't know what finally made it work, but after about 30-45 mins of messing with it, I FINALLY had power to it.

I should have known this would not be the end. Strike three, what almost had me chucking my new computer out the window, was the worst yet.

I had the computer booting up, and it would start loading Windows and then a black screen would come up indicating something was wrong and asking me how I wanted to load windows. I would select "Load Windows Normal" and then it would go to a blue screen explaining either the last hardware or software was not installed properly. I tried three times to bypass this screen when finally a last black screen popped up "Critical Error" and my computer would shut off.

I was livid. I called the shop and the same idiot who charged us twice. I was about to explode, so he got the brunt of it. He admitted to being the one who installed the extra RAM. I asked him if he even tried to load up the computer after installing it. He CLAIMS he did, but after seeing how incompetent he could be, I highly doubted this was the case. I talked to another guy from the company and he agreed to take a look at it.

Sure enough, two days later, the idiot called me back apologizing that it was indeed the RAM. The stick was bad, and had to be replaced with a different one. I was right, he never tried to load the computer after installing it the first time.

When Foster went to pick it up again, he was not so nice to the incompetent employee, and made it VERY clear that we were not happy about the inconveniences.

However, it is all water under the bridge now, because my laptop is up and running, and WONDERFUL! I can edit a photo in a matter of 2-3 minutes as opposed to 10-15. I breezed through 10 the other night in no time. This will allow for more photos edited in less time, which means more time with my hubby:-)