🚀 go-pugleaf

[Thanks to Aahz for telling me about the existence of this newsgroup --
seeing all the Fry's horror stories posted here helps me realize that
I'm not the only one who thinks that Fry's is a Really Bad Thing sometimes.]


All I wanted to do yesterday was find some computer store who sells a
Sony Multiscan 15sf monitor, so I could make sure it's what I want and
then, maybe, buy it.

My first stop was Computerware.  They had one of the monitors set up to
demonstrate, but they were charging $100 more than I could have gotten
the monitor for through mail-order ($450), and they had no interest in
meeting mail-order's price.  Ow!  And then, promptly at six o'clock PM,
they chased me out of there since they were closing.  This place is only
open until 7pm weeknights, 6pm Saturday, and it's closed on Sunday --
how am I ever going to find some time to visit them when they're *open*
for a while?

Then I went to CompUSA, where all of their Macs were dumbed down with At
Ease to prevent me from doing anything useful like getting to the
Monitors control panel to change the monitor's resolution.  The demo
monitors they had there were in pretty sorry shape, but I couldn't find
any Sonies among them.  It took me at least 20 minutes to find a
salesperson and get his attention, at which point he told me that
CompUSA doesn't carry the Sony brand any more, period, for unknown
reasons.

Then I went to the mistake of going to Fry's.  More than half of the
computers they had set up to demo wouldn't even boot up.  Others were
physically damaged, or the monitor display had lost sync, or everything
was up and running but they had At Ease running with no applications
installed so there was absolutely nothing a customer could do to try out
the machine.  A salesperson was watching "Forrest Gump" on an Apple 15"
Multiscan monitor that was hooked up to a Quadra 605 linked to a VCR,
and I asked him if I could play with the display for a moment to see how
good it was, but he was brisk and unhelpful because he just wanted to
get back to watching "Forrest Gump".  I found a Sony Multiscan 15sf that
would lose sync every time it booted up to Windows, so I asked a
salesperson to fix it.  He held down the Escape key for two minutes
before deciding that this wouldn't help, so he started to unhook the
monitor and hook it up to another computer facing the opposite direction
on the other side of the table (which would be completely useless to me
for testing purposes).  I stopped him and said thanks, I'll buy the
monitor somewhere else.  He just shrugged.

My question is, are there any computer stores anywhere in Silicon Valley
that are run by people who actually have *in-depth knowledge* about the
products they're selling and are actually *interested* in selling them,
or am I hoping for too much?

I shudder to think that new computer buyers might wander into somewhere
like Fry's, where I once overheard a salesperson explaining that "dot
pitch" is an indication of how bright the monitor is.  No wonder so many
neophytes are terrified and confused by this industry!

(By the way... anybody out there have a Sony Multiscan 15sf?  Is it
possible to get it to change resolutions on the fly on a Mac?  Does the
monitor remember screen size/position settings when it changes sync?)

-- 
_/_/_/   Be insatiably curious.                 Je ne suis fait comme aucun
/_/_/    Ask "why" a lot.                de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire
_/_/                           n'etre fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent.
  /    Brian Kendig         Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre.
 /    bskendig@netcom.com                                       -- Rousseau
     ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/bs/bskendig/home.html