Upon finding out that it had failed using Hitachi’s Drive Fitness Test, I promptly went to the Western Digital website to start the RMA process.  This hard drive comes with a 3-year warranty.  I started the process and attempted to do an “Advanced RMA” which basically means that I give them a credit card and they put a hold on the card for the MSRP of the hard drive, which was $120.00.  Then they send me the drive in hopes that I ship the drive back.  Otherwise, they will charge the card the full price, which again would be $120.00.

I ended up getting an error message indicating that the “Advanced RMA” could not be performed.  I tried again, same thing.  In the end it told me I had to call in to Western Digital to process the RMA.

I call in only to find out that they DO NOT provide return shipping at no additional cost.  Instead, they make YOU, the user, pay for shipping.  So on top of putting the $120.00 hold they also make you pay for shipping back to them for their own failed product.  Ingenius, is it not?

Anyways, I’m only complaining because if this had been a company called Seagate, this would NEVER have happened.  First of all, you can pay a $10.00 fee (you do not get this back), and they not only ship you the drive next day air but they also provide a return shipping label which has been pre-paid!  Can you believe it?  Oh, I forgot to mention, THEY DO NOT PUT A HOLD FOR THE MSRP OF THE HARD DRIVE ON YOUR CREDIT CARD!

It’s simply amazing that a company would go out of their way to help a client get their replacement hard drive in the fastest possible manner!

From this point on you guys can already guess who I’m sticking with in regards to hard drive purchases, yes, you got it right, Seagate.

Check out his post regarding the Verizon iPhone 4.  He’s had it since last Friday.  The gist of it is that he likes it, Verizon’s network is superior, the call quality is leaps and bounds ahead of AT&T.  The downsides are data is a tad bit slower but not by much and that you can’t be on a call and be using data at the same time.  That’s already been beaten to death.  He says that the Verizon iPhone will beat AT&T.  I’m probably going to buy one for business purposes so I’ll be able to further test.  If I do buy it I will post my results.  I’m with AT&T with an iPhone 4 right now.

On top of that, it looks like Verizon is going to be announcing the CDMA version of the iPhone 4 this coming Tuesday in NYC.

I have to say that there are some minor quirks and one major bug but for the most part, it’s pretty damn great.

The major bug is that the problem when using accelerated scrolling and Microsoft’s own IntelliPoint software, it still goes haywire when you scroll fast down the page like you want to get to the bottom of the page really badly.

Sure, who uses that, right?  Well, I do.  It’s a really great feature and and I’m even sure others know that it exists but when you’re reading an extremely long webpage or scrolling through an extremely long Excel worksheet, it comes in handy.

On the other hand, there are some minor quirks with the way IE9 displays text.  I am assuming it’s either a hiccup with the way the page is being rendered due to it being much more standards compliant now than IE6, 7 and 8 ever were.

But the text looks blurry, and sometimes bold when it really isn’t supposed to look that way.  Like I said, it’s probably just some early bugs that have to be worked out.

Another thing that bugs me beyond belief is that now you can pin websites/favorites to the taskbar.  When certain sites use a specific .xml files, you can have menus pop up just like with regular apps that allow this feature.

The thing is, say for instance you have Facebook and Amazon both pinned to the taskbar.  You click-hold onto the Amazon link and motion upwards and up pops the menu.  You choose a link such as check status of order.  You then want to check on some friends on Facebook.  So you go over to the Facebook link, click-hold and motion upwards and again it brings up a menu for you to choose which link you’d like to see.  So you want to see what your friends are doing, you click on news.  Up opens a brand new browser window instead of a new tab in an already open/existing IE instance.  This is majorly annoying.  We should be able to CHOOSE what we want the new link to do whether it’s open up in a new window entirely or open up in a new tab.  Well, you can’t.

If any of you are on Microsoft Connect, would you please help me out by logging in and voting up my two bugs that I deem very bad/severe.

Bug #: 598701

and

Bug #: 554429

I’d really appreciate it!

In any case, IE9 beta 1 is being released tomorrow morning via Microsoft’s “Beauty of the Web” event.

Why is IE9 so great?

• Conforms to web standards – yes, MICROSOFT, notorious for not comforming to web specifications, is now trying to make right what they wronged many years ago
• Hardware acceleration – this means IE9 can and will use your graphics card to offput some of the rendering for videos and pictures – and this will free up resources available for text
• More webstandards compliance and more webstandards compliance
• Bug fixes and what have you
• I truly hope they have fixed the IntelliPoint accelerated scrolling issue!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tune in tomorrow at “Beauty of the Web.”