Geelong Tourism

I recently decided hired a rental car for a day to go from Melbourne to Belaret. Decided to return to Melbourne via Geelong, a city I had never been to before. On arriving at a waterfront location, there appeared to be few cars around. This should have been a warning, but at this stage I didn't know much about Geelong so tried to work out if it was an area where you paid for parking or not. Regretably I determined it was a free area with a time limit, but it seems it was in fact an area you had to pay for. Arriving back at the rental car, I had a $72 fine.  

I wrote to the Geelong council explaining the circumstances and didn't expect to get a lot of joy, it looked like this was a tourist trap that earned Gelong City a good revenue stream from visitors while locals parked on free parking near-by. Sure enough I got a form letter back from someone claiming to be an Ombudsmen, hadnt it appeared bothered to read what I wrote or couldn't be bothered responding to it. It appears the Ombudsmen is in fact an accountant, and I shouldn't be surprised I guess that an accountant wasn't too interested in an appeal against a parking fine.   

Now I didn't try to evade Geelong parking fees, their signage as I see it on Google Street view isn't very clear and they might well encourage visitors anyway by having an area where people can park for free. $72 is a steep fine and it was clear that it has deterred most people from parking in the area. This must catch quite a few visitors and I expect earns them quite good revenue. If you are a ;local you can appeal to the local Court but of course they would simply confirm there were signs and the council could fine you what they want. I've only got the satisfaction now of telling people not to go to Geelong. 

 

 

Brand Recognition

I have not been particularly aware of brands in the PC and laptop world over the year apart from the makers of the component parts such as motherboards. I have pruchased parts and made my own PC's that may have an Asus or Gigabyte motherboard in them, but never bough a branded PC in a shop. This changed when laptops came along and between home and work PC's, I now have acquired some experience with two brands Acer and HP.  

The experience so far with Acer has been very good value for money PC's that run silently, have a good set of features, and have been trouble free. My experience with HP has been they run with the noise of a jet plane, are poorer value for money, and have had failures which I have found out are manufacturing faults. So although HP might make a perfectly good laptop, ny experience based on two laptops is that they are a company that doesn't do as good a job of making laptops as their rival Acer.

I hadn't really thought about how this would effect a purchase decision until the other day when I finally decided to buy a replacement for one of the HP laptops while I got it repaired.  i went into the shop thinking I would keep an open mind and look at all brnads based on prices and features. I had found myself in a shop on an initial visit screaming inside my head for another customer not to by an HP, so clearly I had crossed them off the list. I looked though at every other brnad and ended up buying an Acer again. The value for moeny poverall was between Acer and Asus for me, but my positive experience with Acer tipped the balance towards what I knew.  

HP have taken a hit in my perception as a customers because their product had a fault at the point of manufacture. They could have rescued it (and possibly still will) by fixing the fault or replacing the laptop with a better one. They don't get the chance to replace it though as the retailer has to make that decision. I also realised I had used a different retailer, even though so far the repairs I had asked for had been done. This was partly to get a batter price, but was also because I don't want to have to argue with a retailer when I have to return a product. The new retailer may be no better, but at this point I don't know because I haven't had a problem with the Acer. 


 

The Customer Isn't Happy

Well last night the noisy laptop shut itself down I an told in the middle of a game Roller Coast Tycoon. Now like a lot of people I suspect, I have a day job that keeps me busy but another job that I never officially asked for - that of home network administrator. This job is thankless, requires me to know everything about every fault immediatly and holds me accountable for the performance of the internet, whether or not the problem stems from withing the home network or not. It started so simply many years ago with one PC, no internet and no mobile devices, oh those were simpler times.   

Now a few years on we have routers, switches, desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, game consoles and media centres. I can't say I'm looking forward to the fridge and oven joining the network, although we already have had the television and the blu-ray player on the network now for a long time, and the printer is available to all through wireless these days and we even have headphones aren't wired to anything.

So I'm struggling to decide whether the laptop that is overheating should go back to the shop, but my network customers are telling me that an overheating laptop isn't good enough.  Now these same customers would have me ring the ISP and tell them to speed the whole internet up so there demands of this administrator are sometimes beyond the realms of what is within my ability to deliver. I guess retailers must have this problem, sir we know your laptop is overheating but why the hell don't you just buy another one and save us all the grief. The answer I think is laptops cost a lot of money and you expect they should last three to five years, and that you will upgrade because you are missing the new shiny featurs like touch screens, not because they sold you a brick.  

When is a repair repaired?

This year I have taken two HP laptop back for repairs and I am certainly wondering what constitutes a successful repair. One of the laptops was taken back because the wireless stopped working, and no arguments they fixed that and also put a new hinge on it. Since then it revs like a jet engine as the fan appears to have been cranked up to some level that makes it appear like it is about to fly into the sky. It didn't do this before the repair but the HP laptops do overall seem to be noiser than the Acer one was have, I can barely hear the Acer laptop at all even if I have been using it for hours playing a game or watching a video.  

The HP meanwhile doesn't have equivilent performance, despite the high speed jet fan, the laptop overheats and shuts down after playing a game on it, even a game like The Sims which can't surely be that taxing on a CPU. Question is should I take it back or move on, the laptop still works ok if used for email on a flat desk surface, it even stays reasonably quiet providing you don't use it for too long and don't do anything that makes it work too hard. Trouble is a find myself making excuses now for why I shouldn't take it back and have another discussion with retailer. This is of course what they want, make it too much of an effort to complain and go buy a new one.