Old News From the BBB

(Very old)

In our newspaper today there were two very large notices. One was about preventing identity theft and it contained a lot of very good information.

But the other notice leaves me wondering, 'who wrote this and how long ago was it written?' The notice/ad was about buying computers. It started off by telling folks who were considering getting a computer for the very first time how to decide what to get, depending on what they planned to do with the computer. So far, so good.

Then the notice went on to say they could save money by having a custom built computer. Uh, no, they can't. This was true several years ago, but not now. The price of new computers for average personal use has dropped to unbelievable lows. Unless a user is into editing high end graphics or graphic intensive games, a very decent computer can be purchased for a whole lot less than one can be built.

It got worse. The writer told the buyer of a custom built computer to run diagnostics on it as soon as they picked it up from the shop where it was built. Now any computer builder worth using would do this before the customer picked it up, but that is not the worst. The writer went on to say 'Use a diagnostic like Norton Utilities for Win 3.1, Win 95, Mac. etc.' What time machine did this writer step from? Win 3.1? Oh dear! And I am pretty sure you can't get a Mac built by anyone except Apple!

This writer had absolutely no idea what he was writing about! However, I suspect this was a re-cycled article from archives.

See, you can't believe everything you read, even from sources that are usually reliable. While all of the above was probably true at one time, it sure isn't true now!

Martha