Me and my dad are impulse buyers.
Given that we are both men, and we both love electronic gadgetry and suchlike, we were out in town one day when we saw one of those really expensive all-in-one electronic personal organisers. This thing promised to keep your dates and important meetings, keep notes, had inbuilt internet, email, etc. It was essentially a BlackBerry on steroids, but this was back in the days before such devices were around.

I'm fairly confident this thing also promised it had GPS and quite possibly the ability to redirect satellites to give you specific coverage and updates on terrorists. Essentially, this thing promised to be like a mobile form of nearly every government counter-terrorist agency*. I believe I may have spaffed my pants at the amount of technology this thing promised to give us.

Jack Bauer himself would have killed to get one of these things. CTU would have been made redundant by this piece of technology which did everything bar making the toast, although I'm sure this would have been worked around in a latter version. In short, this thing was the pinnacle, the apex of technology.

Had it actually worked as promised.

Instead, when we got it home, ignoring the protests of my mum about how it was an expensive bit of crap, we plugged it in and charged it up. We waited for hours with anticipation at our new bit of technology. Finally, we were done charging it up. We switched it on, with bated breath. The screen flickered to life, and abruptly went into weird spaz-out mode. We swore. We cursed. My mum, who had been watching this, laughed at us.

We eventually got bits of it working. I say bits, more like one bit. The bloody calculator function. We had jizzed a large amount of cash on a really, really expensive calculator. The bollocking me and my dad got off my mum didn't hurt nearly so much as the fact that our new toy, our super ultra hyper organiser thingy didn't work. It didn't deliver on the promises it lauded in a sultry voice. We were broken men.

So we returned the fucker to the shop and vowed never to make any more impulse buys.

Five minutes later, we were the proud new owners of a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop...

My mum was not impressed with us. And was really not impressed with the new laptop.

A few months later neither were we. The fucking motherboard died. We had foolishly decided to skimp on a warranty to save money. Fucksocks.

Length? Well, we're not trusted any more with it. :(

*Note: May be slightly embellished. But this thing was loaded with technology.
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Thu 21 May 2009, 13:46, 4 replies)

Reasonable?
Incidently, the warranty is worthless anyway - If the thing broke after say 18 months, you have to ask "Is it reasonable that I have to buy one of these every 18 months?"

If the answer is no, then they will replace it. If not then a judge decides if it's reasonable or not - my guess is not.
(dchurch bah, Thu 21 May 2009, 14:13, closed)

Hmm
I still like to have a warranty on any of my new technology in the event of bits breaking so I don't have to fork out money to get new stuff. I learnt my lesson after the Dell, and started getting warranties on everything. It came in handy for my next big computer purchase, where I got a Macbook Pro and the screen died after two and a half years.

The warranty covered the screen replacement costs, for which I'm grateful for as shortly after getting that new screen, my housemate dropped a large tempered glass potlid from above which hit the screen and fucked it spectacularly. She's yet to cough up the £200 it'll cost to replace the screen.

Still, that Dell was the bane of my life.
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Thu 21 May 2009, 22:13, closed)

What make was it?
My money's on Psion??
(Kip, Thu 21 May 2009, 16:21, closed)

You would win that bet
It was a Psion Netbook. We liked the look of it, shame that it was faulty to the point where we couldn't use it as anything other than a glorified calculator.
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Thu 21 May 2009, 22:08, closed)