Matt Boughton's Blog

Well my first post in a long time is out of frustration for a once respectable company. There was a time when Seagate was known for quality data storage products and good customer service. Next to IBM they were my favorite brand to recommend to customers. Since they acquired Maxtor it would appear not only did they inherit Maxtor’s poor product quality but also their horrible customer service and impossibly redundant and expensive warranty process.

All of the Seagate SATA drives that were purchased for in-house use in the last three years have failed. All of them failed while under warranty however the warranty process is so complex and costly only one will be submitted for warranty replacement. The one I will submit for warranty replacement after the data is recovered is the 2TB Seagate FreeAgent that failed within a few months of purchase and took around 1.5TB of data with it. The rest have already been replaced with Western Digital Caviar drives which are very reliable and actually slightly less expensive than Seagate Barracudas.

Fortunately only about half of the Seagate drives I have sold to customers have failed while under warranty and most of those I have replaced with Western Digital drives which I pay for. Seagate sends out refurbished drives as warranty replacements. Why would I want to replace a drive that was substandard from day one with a substandard drive that has been repaired?

What prompted me to write this is yet another Seagate drive that failed recently. It is a 160GB laptop drive that I installed in a customers computer roughly 18 months ago. The laptop hasn’t suffered any physical damage yet the drive has six bad sectors. Unless I am willing to pay a $20 Advanced Replacement fee it is going to take weeks to get a replacement drive from Seagate. That is a time frame that isn’t acceptable to me or my customer. I ordered a Western Digital Scorpio to replace it which has always been an excellent laptop drive. I have been granted an RMA request by Seagate for the failed drive but I am still losing money on the deal.

I don’t write this in hopes that Seagate will do anything to help me. There really is nothing they can do at this point that will make it right. My reason for writing this is in hope that other people don’t get burned by another company that is just living on a name and a long gone reputation.

I finally got around to upgrading WordPress to a newer version. It has a lot of great new features and spam controls in the backend. Please visit http://www.wordpress.org/

As I am sure many HP/Compaq computer owners have discovered their systems don’t come with restore disks.  At first I thought this was to save a few pennies by not having to produce as many disks but today after I called to request a set of disks for a HP that the hard drive failed on I realized their real agenda.  The so called “technician” who couldn’t speak any form of English I recognized wanted approximately $30 USD for replacement disks.  Disks that cost pennies to produce and should have shipped with the computer from the beginning.
I tried to reason with the HP tech.  I attempted to get transferred to a manager, with no success.  The only options HP offered was to either pay them to fix the machine or pay for the disks.  Either way my customer would be paying their extortion fee and I didn’t like it one bit.  I finally got frustrated and told the HP rep. to get lost.

At this point my customer can either call HP and pay them the money for the disks, buy a new copy of Windows XP or purchase a brand new Dell.  With all the other problems people have with HP/Compaq systems I am amazed that company even stays in business.

I’d recommend staying clear of HP/Compaq.  Especially the models from Costco and Wal-Mart.

I am not a big link sharer but this is noteworthy.  I was hoping with the new congress our free speech rights wouldn’t be attacked as heavily but it appears that isn’t the case.  Anyways, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzaqXFcsH2U then visit the sponsoring site http://www.fccfu.com/ to help spread the word.

The other day I got a call from a customer.  They reported that their computer wouldn’t turn on and the front panel lights would flicker on and off rapidly any time the computer was plugged into the power outlet.  I asked them for a little history on the machine and immediately I knew what was wrong, the [...]

The “default deny” or “default block” security policy is not new but is often forgotten and I just want to reiterate it.  We are most familiar with default deny with our household security.  By default we only allow people we trust access to our house.  Most of us lock our doors when we aren’t around and [...]

I am opposed to the “war” in Iraq.  I have been from the very start.  I was also very opposed to the first Iraq war.  I don’t agree that our government should be bending intelligence so they can justify the invasion of other countries.  However, throughout all of this I still support the troops and their families.

Supporting our troops has NOTHING to do with supporting the war.  I can’t even begin to make sense of comments people make blaming our troops for what is happening in Iraq.  I recently read a comment on another blog where someone went off on a full blown rant to a soldiers wife about how our troops are responsible for what is going on over there and how the wife is just as guilty of murdering people as her husband because she supports him.  Thinking like this is completely irrational.  These brave men and women aren’t over there because they want to be.  They are over there because it’s their job.  They signed up to protect our country from real threats not realizing our government would abuse them however it sees fit.

If you don’t like what’s happening in Iraq take it up with your senators, not the troops and their families.  The soldiers are just trying to do their job and their families need all the support they can get.  If we can blame our troops for the war then we can also blame police officers for laws we don’t agree with and teachers for lack of funding in schools.  Get real people.  Our soldiers didn’t start the war, they aren’t running it and they don’t get to decide when it’s over.  They are controlled by the people in Washington D.C.

Support our troops, bring them home NOW!

Sorry I haven’t been around much.  I have been trying to un-bury myself from the work that has hit me in the last month or so.  Today alone I had to make two service calls for a satelitte systems maintenance company that usually only dispatches me once a month or less.  Some days I really question why I want to be self employed.  The pay sucks,  the benefits suck and I am working all the time.  The boss is a really nice guy so that helps.

Kohl’s

Staples

Cool-Whip

Normally I am fairly bitter around the holidays due to the vast commercialization of everything.  This year the bitterness is kicking in a little bit early.  Why is that?  Because I am already being bombarded with Christmas ads on TV and radio.  One radio station was even playing Christmas music.  I have gotten used to being tortured the entire month of December but now I have to put up with this crap for two months just because the retailers had a bad year.

This time of year retailers, through a well refined and devious marketing engine convince us that it’s our duty to buy as much as we can to give to family and friends.  While giving is a good thing the only real winners here are the shareholders and executives of the huge manufacturing, distribution and retail chains.  In the US these corporations abuse the holiday spirit in order to make the year end on a really good note for them (can you say HUGE holiday bonuses for upper management?).  Personally I am fed up with it and am keeping a list of all companies that are pushing holiday sales and merchandise before December 1st.  If your company ends up on this list you can forget about earning any of my business this holiday season.