This is another case of Trust being abused. Wasn't me this time. It was just a friend operating on my advice. And I failed him. And because of the circumstances on depending on a store and of the product they sold, my credentials as a computer consultant can be called into dispute.
Just because I know the phone number for my hardware guy Patrick does NOT make me a computer consultant. Knowing a bit about the hardware I buy and letting Patrick make it fast and reliable supposedly does.
Back in the summer of 2018, almost two years ago, I was asked to recommend where and what to purchase a replacement for a now-ancient Mac laptop. My friend's budget was in the low two-grand area. I snorted. I could quarter that and let him continue doing what he had been doing, which was writing, a bit of web-browsing and watching movies and TV shows on the laptop. Didn't need to bother Patrick this time at all.
Really, he was describing a low-end Windows laptop. But for him, I wanted some quality in the recommendation and maybe I wouldn't hit the quarter mark, but a third was certainly in play. I recommended a computer shop and told him to go buy a Lenovo.
Lenovo has been my go-to laptop for most of YOUR lives. I'm old, so it's less than half my life that I've been recommending Lenovo's all the way back to when IBM was making them. They had the unique j-pointer nub that served as a short, stubby and always available mousing device ACTUALLY ON the keyboard, negating the need for all those that had touchpads, which I hate with a loathing that eclipses that of the Oleaginous Orange Oaf infesting the Oval Office for a few more months. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate touchpads, which are always TOO touchy or TOO inert to actually do anything. Touchpads are the last resort. Maybe, it's not worth having a computer at all if you are forced to resort to a touchpad. Surely a pencil and writing paper is better (You can scan it later and turn it into text). Touchpads are hardware non grata.
Lenovo's, even since the product line got bought by Chinese concerns and moved to Asia, are still, generally speaking, solid, reliable machines. They are not the best at all things. Far from being the best at this or that, they are the second or third choice. And at the same time, when all those other laptops with the better graphics, or sound, or chassis or ... well you get the drift ... fail badly at something other than their starring feature, the Lenovo rarely has a down side that makes them place low on the ratings of a single feature.
UNTIL that fateful day in 2018 when I recommended a Lenovo that came with Windows 10 ... and just four gigs of memory. That's right, in 2018, SEVEN long years since Microsoft stopped merely saying Windows 10 would run on a machine with just 4G of memory, but that the recommended minimum was EIGHT gigabytes of memory. The INDUSTRY STANDARD for new computers SINCE Windows came out has been 8G since Justin Trudeau wasn't yet Prime Minister.
And of course, there's a reason why the minimum is weasel-ese for "Yeah, it'll do SOME things, one at a time, as long as you are careful" while the actual WORKING minimum is twice as much so that you can write a letter, have the web-browser running to grab a picture of the internet and maybe playing some music in the background. The kind of thing EVERYBODY does with their computer. Or a variation of the same.
When you install Windows 10 on a Lenovo with it's stuff and boot it up, you can check your memory resources and you will be astonished to find it THREE-QUARTERS used up!!!!! What then happens is sort of like a busy working professional working at the desk of their elementary school child with all the deskspace he or she has, versus sitting at their desk at work where the desktop holds everything they need for their job. Instead of storing everything under the chair at school and pulling out various resources as the teacher requests them to, the professional has all the files over in one corner, pictures of their loved ones in another, the phone and computer screen somewhere else and a daily planner, notebook in front of them. Everything in easy reach quickly. No grabbing the backpack and searching through it for particular papers and textbooks. And purses?? I'll leave that topic alone.
The way the four-gigabyte computer works is that it fills up the remaining gig of working memory with program code and data until the overflow mark gets hit. Then it off loads what it thinks is currently unneeded code and data and grabs more off the hard drive. Swaps it in and out. And this swapping goes on as needed, allowing Microsoft to claim Windows 10 WILL WORK in 4G of memory. It's legally true. But it ain't practical. Not by a long shot.
I was having a bad day that day. I screwed up at an epic level. I let my friend, no, I GUIDED my friend into buying a computer with an inadequate amount of memory. And he ended up paying a little over a THOUSAND DOLLARS for this computer and a few gewgaws I insisted were absolutely necessary to having a laptop these days ... external storage, a powered USB hub, etc. I SAVED him a grand, but not the 1500 hard-earned dollars I sort of promised I would. I FAILED my friend now. And later.
My friend endured this slow hunk a junk for more than 18 months (long after the warranty had worn out). He asked me to take a look at it. I was confused and went down the wrong way a couple of times. Eventually I found the memory issue and had a meltdown. I was furious. I was sure there was bait and switch involved. Nope, they sold him what they said they would sell him AND WERE STILL SELLING LENOVO's with only 4G of memory IN THIS WEEK'S SALES FLYER!!!!!! In 2020!!!
They WERE doing a bait and switch with a novel twist. Sell rubes the computer and then wait for the inevitable return by the customer asking why the computer was so slow. Offer to fix if for between 70 and 140 dollars and suddenly, a computer worth MAYBE 500 bucks, being sold on sale for 759 marked down from 850, turns into a one thousand dollar sale. I had actually contacted the store chain in question (the local store wouldn't answer any of my four calls mid-afternoon on a Saturday) so I had to phone one of the other branches to ascertain the cost of adding memory to the Lenovo. Thiry bucks for the technician, 40-110 for the memory, depending on model and desires for how much memory. Off I sent him A SECOND TIME, to do one last bit of business with these crooks.
I had already canceled my account with the store chain and told Patrick that I would never pay an invoice from them ever again. HIS choice of where to buy the hardware for me, but it had to be behind my back. Yeah, it's cheating in a way, but I HONESTLY never want to see a CENT of my money ever go to these amoral, unethical, crooked, (the list of adjectives runs on for 21 more words,, which I will spare you at this point) SOBs.
And of course, feeling immensely worse, the situation actually got worse. On his way to buying more memory to cure the laptop's performance issue, he ran into two techs who figured out there was not going to be any more money in this customer. So, they told him it wasn't a MEMORY situation, he had to get a new solid-state, all memory drive to cure his problem. Only 220 dollars of his money, rather than the 95 I had figured for the fair acquisition and installation of the memory. And my friend, remembering why his old Mac ground to a halt (storage space completely consumed) and some of my ramblings when I was searching for the lack of speed on his new Lenovo, thought to himself, okay, experts all agree. Time to pull out the plastic and solve the problem right there and then.
He was robbed. Pure and simple. The rolled him like thugs in a blackened alley. Mugford's recommended shop mugged my friend. I am ashamed of myself. Of them, contempt close to Mount Mugford erupting. And my lawyer recommends against that. So do my doctors. And based on the advice of the legal eagle, I can't named this well-known chain of Computer stores in Ontario that seem to be a national brand. ALL I can do, is to warn shoppers that if a store is WILLING to sell you name-brand computers with only 4G of memory, they are willing to screw you over time and time again until you catch on.
Patrick, as slow to anger as any non-Zen Buddhist monk, got angry. Not like me, but he was upset. He hardly tried to tamp me down.
He found that the computer with the added SSD (and the old drive stuck in a bitlocker protected case that couldn't be plugged in to the new system and all the original installation and data was missing as an old Windows 10 image is what was installed on the SSD ... crooks AND LAZY, what a wonderful combination), was about 15 percent faster than the mechanical hard drive the SSD replaced. Granted, with Windows updated, all the drivers updated and obvious settings changed to take advantage of the SSD, Patrick was able to bump up the speed benefit for the new SSD to something approaching 30 percent. He also installed two new memory strips (I gave him a hundred bucks and told him that was the budget for the memory AND HIS TIME), quadrupling the original amount of memory. And he fiddled with the drive unit he'd been given to house the old drive and turned it into something usable by my friend, meaning he now had a hardly-used 256G drive he could put into a shirt pocket. My friend will finally be well-served.
NOTE: It is accepted wisdom that users ONLY start to notice a speed increase when it passes 10 percent.
What those two techs did crossed the line I'm sure the lawyers for this bandit organization vetted as being legal. I think they committed actual fraud. But my friend is joining me in putting the store chain in the rear view mirror. It's just too bad that they old saw of buying a name brand means safety and basic levels of performance.
You aren't buying the name any more, you are buying what you get. Caveat Emptor indeed.
