$599 for a Notebook Computer? Ha!

Lured in by its $599 purchase price, I just bought a Dell Latitude D531 notebook computer, which landed up costing me $1,101 after "customizing" it.  When purchasing a computer, "customizing" is a euphemism for "making it usable." 

What jacked up my price by over $500?  Consider:

- At half a gig, the memory (RAM) that they provided would make the notebook barely operational.  So I bumped it up to 1 gig, a minimum amount for a computer running Windows XP (more on Windows XP later).

- An 80 gig hard drive is okay, but these days with music, photos and videos, it can get filled up awfully fast, so I bumped it up to 120 gigs.

- The biggest item is often the warranty.  The Latitude comes with a 3 year warranty that requires you to send it back to Dell and then you have to wait ten days before they repair and return it.  Ten days without a computer?  I don't think so.  So I upgraded it to a "next business day" warranty and also purchased a separate warranty that would repair or replace the notebook if I did something as silly as spill some coffee on it or drop it from three stories up (I'm not sure if I would be covered if out of frustration I threw the computer out the window, something that I've come close to doing in the past).

- $85.10 sales tax.  I guess there's no way for ordinary citizens like me to get around that.  Of course, the sales tax was a lot more because the price turned out to be a lot higher.  I guess one feeds off the other.

You should expect similar add-ons when buying your own computer.  Don't be fooled by the $599 or even $499 price tags - there's no way that they are going to let you get away with paying the advertised price.  You could buy it at that price, but you wouldn't be happy with what you got. 

Anyone ever hear of the truth in advertising laws?

Oh yes, about Windows XP.  Why didn't I get the Vista operating system, the latest Windows operating system?  Because it's still buggy, still has compatibility problems with some computer peripherals, and I'm not the kind of guy who enjoys "tinkering" with my computer's operating system.  I just want it to work. 

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