New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

Archive for July, 2006

A while back I got tired of sending money to my cell phone provider every month for the grand privilege of carrying a cell phone around with me. I would not have been so bothered by it if it was something I used every day or perhaps even every week.

I’m not a typical cell phone user. I’m not one of those people who has to have a cell phone glued to my ear as I am driving down the highway or walking down the street. Maybe I’m just not an important guy, but it does make you wonder how we all got along before the cell phone was invented!

I work from my home office and do not go out all that much. When I do, however, I like to have a cell phone with me for emergencies and those rare times when I have a reason to call someone while I am away from the house. It did not seem like a great deal to be paying the cell phone company every month for a service I actually used only rarely.

One day about a year ago my wife had the idea to get my oldest son a cell phone for his birthday. He was in high school, would be driving soon and it seemed like a good idea for him to have a phone for the same reasons I wanted one.

After a little research on the Internet, she discovered TracFone. It’s one of those pre-paid cell phone plans where you buy your airtime in advance and buy more only when you need it. Although that’s not exactly how the deal works. More on that later.

TracFone seemed like the perfect solution and since they were available at the local Wal-Mart store, it would be easy to go in and pick one up for him.

I had done a little research myself before actually purchasing the phone and although I was a little put off by some of the things I read about TracFone, I realized that there are always people that will complain about a product or services no matter how good it may be, so we decided to go ahead and get him the phone.

Of all the complaints I read about TracFone, the one that stuck with me was the reports that every call to TracFone customer service is answered by someone whose native language is not English and it can be difficult to communicate with some of their customer service people.

It’s not that I have a problem speaking with someone who was not raised speaking English. It’s more the fact that I rather like being able to understand and converse with someone without difficulty when I call anyone for any type of customer service. I’ve had my share of bad experiences speaking (or trying to!) with customer service people that don’t have the best English-speaking skills and it is one of the most irritating experiences I can imagine when calling a company to resolve some kind of problem.

Setting up the TracFone involved using the company’s web site to obtain a number of codes that are required to be entered into the phone in order to activate it. Although the number of codes required did seem a bit overdone, it all worked out and we were able to charge up my son’s new phone with the airtime units that we purchased for him and the phone seemed to work just fine. A bit better even, than my standard cell phone.

When it is time to purchase more airtime, you can go to the company’s web site and use your credit card to purchase the number of airtime units you desire. You are then given the codes to use on your phone to add the new airtime units to it.

The mistake I made when I first became acquainted with pre-paid cell phone service was to assume that the airtime purchased would be mine forever. After all, I paid for the airtime and thought that I should be able to keep it as long as I wanted. I was mistaken.

When your new airtime units are purchased you are also given a date when your minutes expire. This date as well as your remaining airtime units are shown on the phone’s display screen so you always know how much time you have left.

Although the idea of airtime minutes that expire after I bought them did not sit well with me, I realized that I would still be saving money when comparing the TracFone service to my standard cell phone plan.

The TracFone was working out pretty well for my son so we decided to dump our standard cell phone plan and replace it with a TracFone as well. It worked out well for us as well and we did not run into any significant problems with the service.

A couple of months ago I decided to get yet another TracFone since the other one was being carried by my wife most of the time and I liked the idea of having one of my own. $20 is not a huge investment by any means, so I ordered up my own TracFone.

I was not as fortunate with my TracFone as my wife and son have been. The trouble began when I attempted to add airtime units a couple of weeks ago before leaving for vacation.

While in the process of purchasing airtime on the TracFone web site ‘ and after I had entered my credit card info and made the purchase, of course ‘ I was presented with a message regarding ‘technical difficulties’ and was informed that the site was not able to complete the transaction at that time. I was given two codes and instructed to try them ‘later’ to redeem my airtime.

For the next three of four days I tried using the codes to redeem my minutes but was always left with a ‘Unable to complete transaction’ or ‘Call customer service’ message.

Calling customer service was what I was trying to avoid and was the reason I had been patiently attempting to use the codes to redeem my minutes. Previous experience calling TracFone customer service had revealed that the information I had discovered about customer service people with poor English skills was true. I wanted to avoid dealing with that, but with vacation looming in the near future, I did not have much choice in the matter.

My first call to customer service did not go so well. For some reason, the person who answered could not hear me at all and ended up terminating the call. The second call was answered by someone whose English was so poor that I could barely understand his greeting and this time, I just hung up. Yeah, I know, that seems rude, but I would rather not waste my time trying to explain to him why I was terminating the call. Especially when I consider it rude for the company to be connecting customers in the U.S. (an English speaking country the last I knew) with customer service representatives that have terrible English skills.

Calling TracFone customer service is an interesting experience beyond the challenge one is presented with in order to communicate with some of their employees. The connection is always a poor one with bits of distortion that creep into the audio almost constantly. Beyond that, you can hear what seems like a thousand other voices in the background talking constantly. You get the impression that your call is spanning the galaxy and not simply our little planet.

My third call was indeed the charm and I was connected to a woman whose English was quite acceptable. After a number of apologies, she proceeded to provide me with the codes I needed to add airtime to my Tracfone.

When the process was completed, I was a little surprised to see that my phone now displayed 296 airtime units and an expiration date of 12/5/2006. I was surprised since I had purchased only 60 airtime units on the web site which should have expired in October. Perhaps, I thought, they were giving me some bonus airtime to make up for the inconvenience I experienced trying to add airtime to my phone. How nice.

During vacation I used my TracFone more than normal and it seemed to be working just fine. Right up until the last day. That morning at breakfast I pulled it from my pocket to check the time (I hate wearing a watch) to find that the display was blank. I fiddled with it and attempted to re-set it by removing the battery to mo avail. It was dead.

When I returned home I called TracFone customer service and was fortunate to be connected to a fellow who was quite apologetic and spoke very good English to boot. They guy must have apologized 6 times (no exaggeration!) for my inconvenience and promised to straighten it all out for me.

After I was able to make him understand that the phone was completely dead, he forwarded me to a woman who would make arrangements for shipping me a new phone. This is where my warning comes in.

When we got to the part where she asked me how many minutes I had remaining on my phone before it died, I told her it was about 259. It was a number I was pretty sure of since I always check my remaining airtime minutes when I complete a call.

‘Oh,’ she said ‘That might be a problem.’ When I asked her why, she informed me that there was no way they could verify that the number I was giving them was true.

At this point, I came to a sudden realization regarding TracFone.

Apparently, all the tracking of your airtime minutes is done within the phone itself. That was something I had thought about in the past and wondered whether the units were tracked only within the phone or were also tracked by way of some data that might be passed back to TracFone via the cellular network.

This answered my question and is the reason for my warning.

Another annoying thing TracFone does is sending spam. Sure, technically it may not be spam since they are a company you have a ‘relationship’ with, which makes them exempt from the spam regulations. But to me, a message I do not want and that is trying to sell me something is still spam.

Not only do they spam you via e-mail, they also spam your phone. Recently I was receiving text messages with ‘special offers’ each time I turned my on my phone. I would turn it on, throw it on the seat in my car and then it would emit a loud ‘beep’ to let me know a new text message had arrived. More spam from TracFone. Very annoying.

So I sent then an e-mail and asked them to stop spamming my phone and they promised that it would stop. And it did. For about a week or two and then it started again. Gee, thanks TracFone.

I mention the spam because it is always intended to convince me to buy more airtime for my phone. It is always a ‘special deal’ that promises bonus minutes if I purchase a certain (usually large) amount of airtime.

Getting back to my friend on the phone who seems to have doubts about my 259 minutes, I then ask her how much time they will be able to transfer to my new phone. After putting me on hold for a while she finally tells me that she can give me 150 minutes at best.

In my particular situation, that’s not so bad since I had ended up with a lot of extra minutes following the ‘technical difficulties’ fiasco I encountered when trying to purchase airtime on their web site. So, rather than argue about minutes that I had been given essentially free, I told her that would be fine.

If you are a TracFone user, I’d advise you to be cautious about purchasing any large chucks of airtime from for your phone.

Looking at the TracFone web site, I see that they offer some rather large blocks of airtime that customers may purchase. Currently, I see 250 minutes for $49.99, 400 minutes for $79.99 and a few other choices as well.

The problem appears to be that if your TracFone is lost, stolen or just flat out dies like mine did, TracFone is only going to provide you with 150 airtime units on your replacement phone even if you had 399 airtime units left on your original phone because they have no way of knowing how many minutes you actually used.

I tend to purchase my airtime in small increments anyway, so I probably would not be burned by this in the long run. I certainly won’t be considering the purchase of any large amount of airtime in the future.

It’s more the principal of the whole thing than the money involved. Although I certainly would not be happy about losing that either! If it is one thing that really irritates me as a consumer, it’s not getting a product or service that I paid for.

If my experience with TracFone is any indication, it appears that is exactly what can happen if you take them up on one of their offers to purchase large amounts of airtime. I’m glad it was a lesson I was able to learn the easy way.

A quick scan of the TracFone ‘Terms & Conditions’ did not reveal anything about this apparent policy with regard to the 150 unit maximum of airtime. It may be buried deep within some other document that they sent me but I don’t have the inclination to dig through it all to see if it is there.

If you are a TracFone user, just keep this in mind if you are considering the purchase of any large blocks of airtime units. I would advise against it.

[tags]tracfone[/tags]

During August of 2004 I purchased a Toshiba Satellite A65-S1662 laptop computer. If you’re in a hurry and don’t feel like reading this entire post, let me save you some time and just advise you to stay clear of Toshiba laptops and buy something better. There now, go back to your research.

My Toshiba laptop performed quite satisfactorily until one day about 6 months ago. I finished using it one evening and put it away, only to find that it was incapable of operating the next day when I attempted to boot it up. Since I am quite comfortable diagnosing and repairing my own computers, I decided to have a look.

I don’t have a lot of experience working on laptops but I was still able to come to the conclusion that the memory (RAM) had probably gone bad. Since I did not have a whole lot of time to invest in learning how to repair a laptop at the time, I set it aside and planned to look at it more closely some day. I was not entirely sure if I would try to repair it myself or have someone else do it. I figured I was looking at a simple memory replacement that might cost me $70 or so to do it myself or perhaps $100 or $200 at most to have someone else do it.

Today I decided to dust off the laptop and have a serious look at it and get it repaired. We’re taking a family vacation in a few weeks and I thought it might be handy to have it along since our hotel does have Wi-Fi access. As I always do, I started my search for information on the internet and found some helpful guides that covered laptop disassembly and repair.

I was able to download a memory test program that was highly recommended by a laptop repair technician. I was able to put the test program on a bootable CD and use it to test the laptop’s memory. Sure enough, the result was a sea of red from non-stop errors scrolling across the laptop’s screen. It appeared that my suspicion was correct and the memory had gone bad. That was no surprise, but what I discovered next certainly was.

In researching the problem further, I discovered that this laptop is blessed with ‘onboard’ memory. Sure, you can do a memory ‘upgrade’ by adding more by way of a handy slot on the bottom of the unit. However, the ‘onboard’ memory is integrated with the system board (or ‘mother board,’ if you prefer) and cannot be removed. Since my laptop did not have a memory upgrade installed, it was pretty obvious that it was the ‘onboard’ memory that had failed.

What does this mean? It means in order to repair this laptop, I would need to purchase a new system board. A quick look around the net revealed that a new system board would cost me between $300 and $400 or so. Considering that fact that I paid $800 to purchase this laptop (brand-new) and it was about to cost me approximately half of that to get it repaired, I decided on another option.

I packed it back up in its original shipping box and stashed it away in on of our storage areas. You know, the place you keep all the old exercise equipment, sports equipment and the 968 pounds of colorful plastic that represents all the toys your kids no longer play with since they are now driving automobiles and are no longer interested in ‘Barney’ or ‘Power Rangers.’ Lord knows what I will ever do with the laptop, but I cannot yet bring myself to toss an $800 purchase that was made less than two years ago into the trash can.

With the lack of confidence I now have for anything with a label that says Toshiba, I am not about to invest in repairing a laptop when I would expect it to fail again some day in the not-too-distant future. This laptop did not even ‘live’ to be two years old before it utterly failed. To me that says Toshiba does a pretty poor job designing and building the products they sell.

For a couple of hundred dollars more than it would cost me to replace the system board in my laptop, I could purchase a brand-new laptop from a manufacturer that I might have a little more confidence in. Not to mention and extended warranty (more on that below).

During my short walk up to the storage area, I made a mental note to never purchase another single product with the name Toshiba on it ever again. That is not a promise I make to myself lightly. Yes, when it comes to products and services, I do indeed hold a grudge and it is a lifelong one at that. I have written about experiences like this in the past, such as my happy and satisfying experience (yeah, right) owning a 1991 Ford Taurus a number of years ago.

I have learned a few lessons from this experience, and I am happy to share them with you.

Number One: I will never cut my research short again. I am usually the kind of guy that spends a day or two on the internet thoroughly researching before making any kind of major purchase. I had heard a few good things about Toshiba laptops through the years and allowed that to influence me instead of conducting all the research I would normally do. In searching for information today, I discovered that there was no shortage of trouble with Toshiba laptops and one laptop technician reported more problems than usual with the system board on the model I own. Not a surprise at this point, I am sorry to say.

Number Two: Never, and I mean never, buy a laptop without an extended warranty. I normally never purchase an extended warranty for anything, so I do not make this recommendation lightly. I read advice from a few laptop repair specialists on the net that made this recommendation and after this experience, I must agree with them completely. I would not hesitate to purchase an extended warranty covering four or more years if I was purchasing a new laptop.

Number Three, if you decide to ignore the advice in ‘Number Two,’ you might save yourself a lot of trouble and money if you buy a laptop that does not have ‘onboard’ memory so it can be replaced if it goes bad. Anything that is ‘onboard’ or integrated on the motherboard will be cause for you to replace the entire system board if it fails.

Number Four: Don’t buy a laptop if you really don’t need a portable computer. This one will be controversial, I am sure. I have always hated laptops, and after this experience, I am not feeling that much better about them. When I worked in the computer industry and had to support various operating systems and software, I always hated working on laptops because they were quirky, generally slower than the desktop systems and the small keyboards and pointing devices were a pain to use.

Granted, laptops have a come a long way and are probably a lot less quirky and much faster than they were five or six years ago, but I’d still much prefer to use a desktop system. If you are handy at all with electronics, you can make many repairs on your desktop system yourself and it will cost you less.

In other words, don’t buy a laptop because it is ‘cool’ or because everyone else has one. If you truly want a computer you can walk around and use in various areas of your home or take on a trip, yes, you really need a laptop. However, if you just want a PC to park on your desk and use at home, save yourself money and potential hassle and buy a desktop system.

I am glad that I don’t have a serious need for a laptop computer right now. I will probably look at the possibility of buying another one some day, and right now I don’t have any idea which brand I could feel good about. One thing is certain however, it will not have the name Toshiba on it.

[tags]toshiba, laptop, review, failure[/tags]