Dell-icious

Dell-icious

I just saw on the web that one of my favorite magazines, PC Accelerator is folding. It's a rather juvenile magazine, but it's fun to read a magazine which included blood alcohol contents with every review when they did their flight simulator roundup. The page on their site which announces the end of the magazine says that we loyal subscribers will probably get a subscription to PC Gamer to compensate us for our loss. The only problem with this is that I already subscribe to that magazine, so I fired off a quick e-mail to the subscription department, like PCXL suggested, here's what I got back:

Hello! Thanks for writing PC Accelerator! We have just received your customer service inquiry and and we are looking into your questions as quickly as possible. Please allow 2 to 3 days for a response (if one is required) so that we may adequately review your records. Donít forget to include your full name and address along with any other specifics with all correspondence. We value you as a subscriber and look forward to helping you in any way that we can!

Okay, fine, a standard auto-responder, but then five minutes later, I got this e-mail:

Your customer service request has been received by PC Accelerator. You should receive an email response in 2-3 business days.

Umm, thanks, but I got that from the first message, do I really need two pieces of mail to explain this concept to me? Needless to say, I don't have high hopes...

When I got back from the Microsoft event last night, there were four big Dell boxes stacked near my desk. Inside were our new Optiplex GX110 desktops. These are the first 733mHz machines I've ever used, and they're FAST. So far, my only gripes are that for some weird reason Dell puts the Windows 2000 Product ID number on the side of the machine, so you see this rather ugly Microsoft sticker there, and that the cases are sinfully ugly.