So the only place I use XM is on my motorcycle. XM has value for me, as I typically like to ride long distances. It’s not unusual for me to say ride 2400 miles over a 3 day weekend whilst rallying. (yes you read that right twenty four hundred miles).
This certainly means I’m all over the place and being able to listen to a consistent signal or station is a good thing.
XM is pretty consistent on the highways, but when you’re in the mountains (which is where we prefer to ride) it can be spotty. Especially when you’re on the north east side of the mountain.
So, being that I live in the North East, motorcycling unfortunately isn’t a year round event. From sometime in November to at least the end of February, with a few exceptions the bike gets put away.
Every year I call up XM, explain to them that I don’t need the service until March. They threaten me with re-activation fees but when I persist they have usually discounted those months. Enough so that it’s still worth it for that rare winter day around here when it hits 50 degrees and we go out for a ride.
Since the XM/Sirius merger, there isn’t any competition. You can’t play one off the other any more.
I picked up my bill this year to start the negotiating process that happens every winter. Only to come to a few new realizations that really bothered me.
I remember last year being promised the price wouldn’t change for, I *think* 3 years.
So what’s the strategy? We didn’t raise our prices, but we now have to charge you a music royalty fee. WTF?
This irritates me.
I *may* not even listen to music, in fact I generally listen to sports, or the comedy channel. Their 80’s channel only has 100 songs, if you ride a 12 hour ride you will hear all of them, often twice.
I’m not against the artists being paid, but I am against XM billing me for a line item that is simply part of their cost of doing business.
Very few industries can do this. I don’t patronize car repair places that charge me a line item ‘rag-fee’ or ‘fluid disposal fee’, and I likely won’t patronize XM any more.
I also get dinged $2.00 so they can send me an invoice. I’m perfectly happy to receive this digitally, but no, I’m not going to let them auto-charge me for anything. When they auto-charged my credit card in years past they couldn’t seem to charge me the same amount twice (even though my subscription didn’t change)
This year, they have a new feature. I am apparently not alone. They now let you suspend your account. So that later you don’t have to be threatened with re-activation fees. They also get to continue to list you as one of their ‘subscribers’ albeit a suspended one.
So for now I’m a suspended subscriber. Helping to dilute your royalty fees. I expect that will remain until I just have to have it for a big trip.
We’ll see.
Dell e4300 is bittersweet.
December 16, 2008 in Commentary, Gadgets, Network Managment, The Truth Hurts, Things that are Awesome by datapoohbah | 118 comments
We’re Dell fans, especially latitude fans. Super stable hardware. We recently did a technology upgrade in our department and switched from the D-Series Latitudes to the e-Series. We have a handful of e6500′s, a few 6400′s and a couple e4300′s.
For the most part this 1st generation of laptops has gone well. Not perfect, but pretty good. The e64/6500′s have seen a few BIOS upgrades that have worked out most of the issues. The fingerprint reader/software combination (Dell Control Point) is still crap though. Very unreliable. Especially when compared the Wave fingerprint software that came bundled with an XPS that I own.
Outside of that they have been pretty good.
The e4300, not so much.
This little laptop is super sweet. Nice small, fast, good battery life. But we’re experiencing some hard hangs/freezes. We’ve tried multiple flavors of OS’s, multiple driver combinations, all with little success. We’ve also replaced the motherboard in one unit. The problem persists.
I realize these are relatively new, but it amazes us that a google search for this issue returns nada. Both laptops behave the same, random hard lock-ups.
It seems sleep/video/audio related, and no we can’t make it happen but it’s enough to send them back for the time being.
We’re working with our Dell rep and hopefully someone from the Brand Team to get to a resolution. We really want them to work and be stable. There isn’t another laptop out there that $ for $, feature for feature meets the need.
So if you’ve experienced similar issues I’m interested in hearing from you.
Post a comment and we’ll get in touch.
UPDATE
On Friday the 19th I had a conversation with a Latitude Brand Manager. He assured me that this problem is well known, especially with e4300′s running Vista. A BIOS updated to address this specific freezing issue is in the works and slated to be released on the 29th.
We’re going to hang tight until then. If this is known inside Dell, and being worked on. The fact that none fo the Tier 2/Tier 3 Support people had any clue is somewhat bothersome. We’ll report back if the fix does what it’s supposed to.