Things Don't Always Work Out As Planned!

Office Max gets my vote as the nice people business this year! Those DVD+Rs that I purchased on my last post turned up to be duds, and I was unable to burn any of them that were more than coasters when I finished. They were 1x to 16x disks. My internal burner in my Dell computer is an older model that burns 4x. I have been having trouble lately with any disk that wasn't the Maxell brand. So, what should I do? I decided that since I am a pro photographer by trade, and put lots of images on CD and DVD, I should get a newer and faster drive to burn the images. For one, I had a folder with 70 GB of images in it from a job I did recently. That's right, seventy gigabytes. And most of it has to be put on DVDs to clear my 3 hard drives for the next jobs. The real job here is the time it takes to burn a DVD (around 24 to 31 minutes on my old drive) and the time it takes to visually verify that all of the images can be brought up from the DVD before I can delete those images from the hard drive. If even one of them can't be brought up, it may mean scrapping the DVD and starting over. It can take several hours to bring up all the images on a DVD as some are rather large tiff files, like 28 to 38 megabytes each, or the raw images, where I have taken 10 different exposures of the same image to get all the latitude available in a scene.

Well, all of the Magnavox DVDs I recently bought (see my previous post) never made it to a failure of one or more images. After I burned them, my finicky reader drive didn't even recognize it had a disk in it! This was a quicker way to know I had a failure, but it was taking over 20 minutes and a DVD to know I had a failure. After burning 3 failures in a row, I knew this was going to take a long time, and a lot of DVDs. I decided to buy a new burner. I researched lots of different ones from Office Max, Office Depot, and Staples . It was confusing as hell. Who knows what will be important later? Is DVD-Ram something I am interested in? What speeds are attainable? Is 40x that much slower than a 48x burn? I received an email from Circuit City, that showed they are having a sale. I went to their web site, and found an external HP DVD 840 unit that burns every kind of disk you can imagine. It burns DVD +R, DVD -R, dual-sided disks, CD -R, and even DVD-Ram. It also has Lightscribe, a laser operation that allows you to turn Lightscribe media upside down and laser label the media. (I haven't tried this yet!)

Anyway, I buy the unit online from Circuit City and pick it up at the store. There is no shipping charge. I get the unit home, hook it up, and still can't burn one of the Magnavox DVD +Rs to work in my finicky reader drive. Now, why don't I get a new reader drive - maybe that's the problem? Well, I like having a reader drive that is so hard to burn for. I use the burner to burn for the clients, too. If I burn a DVD (or CD, for that matter), and they have an older drive that won't read the media, then I have to get them one that does. Most of the time, they need it "yesterday," and that was a week ago. The first media I send them has to work! If my finicky drive likes it, then probably theirs will, too.

So, to get back to the story, I take the DVDs back to where I bought them, Office Max. I bring the receipt and I take it to the clerk at the checkout aisle. She happily takes my receipt and enters the info into their system, and tells me that she needs to call the manager. It seems the system only wants to give me a refund of $19.00 and change on a $24.99 purchase. I had used a discount card to buy the DVDs and other items on that receipt and it was pro-rating the refund by deducting part of the discount. The manager came, and she explained her problem to him. She felt I should get a full refund of $24.99 on the DVDs and the manager agreed! He keyed in something on the register and it gave me a credit for the full amount. I hadn't even asked for it. I thanked them and went over to their shelves to see if there were any other DVDs I could purchase that would work in my new drive. The manager followed me over to the DVD aisle and suggested the HP DVD +R 16x disks, which were now on sale, 100 for $24.99. They are a funny light orange color, but they will be easy to read the facing, when using a black Sharpie marker. I also hoped that since the drive was made by HP, and the new disks were from HP, I would have fewer failures. So far, so good. I have burned 10 DVDs from that stack and I am 10 for 10. And, it takes around 6 minutes to burn a whole DVD now, so it helped timewise. Time will tell. At least I am off to a good start.

Two Clerks Saved Me Money Today!

I needed some office supplies today. I needed some inkjet cartridges and some DVD +Rs. I went to one big chain office supply, and saw DVD +Rs there, 20 for 19.99. I was going to another big chain office supply store in the area, as well, because they had sent me some of those discount cards: $10.00 off if you buy $50.00 worth, etc. I actually had 3 of them that had not expired. Two had the same expiration date, 12/16/06, and one had a date in January, 2007. Anyway, something told me not to buy the DVD +Rs at the first store. I went to the second store, and asked one clerk where the DVD media was. He walked me over there and we both looked at the shelf. I spied a large spindle package of DVD +Rs made by Magnavox that was on sale for half-price - 100 disks for $24.99. This meant that they were around 25 cents each. Now, I go through a lot of DVDs in my business. They don't spoil, so buying a quantity is not a problem, but on the other hand, I make a lot of drink coasters out of them due to media failures. Quality is even more important than price. I asked the clerk if they were any good. He said he hasn't seen anybody bring them back. That is good enough for me to give them a try. This chain will take them back if they have a high failure rate. Let's see, I would have to spend around $100.00 to buy 100 disks at the other store, 20 at a time, and I spent around $25.00 to get the same amount. I saved $75.00 just on that tip. Here is the rest:

I went up to the counter to pay the cashier for my $78.00 worth of inkjet cartridges, and the $25.00 for the disks. I had the $10.00 discount cards, and was looking at them to see if it was more advantageous to use one instead of another. The clerk asked me if I would like to use two of them. I said that I thought you could only use one. She said she would split my order, and asked if I would mind paying separately for each. Of course, I was happy to do that. I couldn't believe it. She offered! I did them both on the same credit card, needing to sign for each. I saved close to 20%. I still have the last card which expires in January, but that is for a $10.00 discount, if I spend $20.00 or more. I will be back before it expires. The moral to the story is that I won't be afraid to ask if I can split the order, and won't assume that I can't.