Yet another CompUSA ripoff

Remember that VAIO laptop I purchase from CompUSA? I purchased it on 02/11/2007
for $2362.98 using a new CompUSA credit card -- I wanted to take advantage of a no interest for 6 months offer. I did not receive a bill from CompUSA until 03/18/2007, which I thought was a little late, but not terribly so. CompUSA claims they billed me on 02/18/2007, and this is confirmed by their electronic customer service (hrsaccounts.com) records. However, I did not receive a paper copy of the 02/18/2007 statement in the mail, nor did I receive any other
notification for it.

You can guess the rest of the story -- the March bill contained a $35.00 late fee, plus the 0% interest rate had reverted to 22.65%. I immediately called customer service, but the representative I spoke to was unhelpful, condescending, and downright rude ("SIR! -- What makes you think you don't have to pay your bills, SIR!"). I decided the best course of action was to pay off the original purchase price of $2362.98. Well, when I got my April bill it showed a balance of $110.98. I've tried to close the account, but have been told by CompUSA that I must pay the accumulated interest and late charge.

Fees

Bitching about fees is nothing new but this doesn't change the fact that I hate them.

Stickers

I purchased a new Sony Vaio laptop from CompUSA this afternoon. It had 8 different stickers on it, all of which required immediate removal. There were four from Sony itself, mostly touting the features of the computer. One was the normal lawyer bullshit. Then there were 4 others:

(1) Microsoft's Windows XP (Vista Ready!)
(2) Intel's Centrino Duo (the spec sheet says Core 2 Duo, but I can't be bothered with Intel's byzantine processor naming conventions.)
(3) An announcement that this laptop complied with some standard I've never heard of.
(4) NVIDIA letting me know that it provided the graphics chip.

All but NVIDIA's stickers were relatively easy to remove without leaving residue. The NVIDIA one really didn't want to come off. I pried and pulled but did not want to get one of those under the fingernail cuts that hurt so much. Anyway, I finally got it off, but it left behind a fair amount of adhesive. GooGone is great for this sort of thing.

I paid $2400 for this laptop. Does this not buy some freedom from intrusive ads?

Next post -- bitching about the 22 separate system tray "helper" applications and the 9 desktop icon ads.

Worthless Wizards

The world champion for this irritant must be the "Compressed (zipped) Folders Extraction Wizard". This wizard is so bad, it's hard to know where to begin complaining. First, do we really need a wizard for such a simple task? Second, if we must have a wizard, can't it be quick and painless? Do we really need the Welcome screen? Third, why is it so incredibly slow opening archives with lots of files? Cygwin's unzip is vastly faster.

Shell extensions can be great. When they don't suck.