Different price -- Processing fees? They were mentioned by another comment above.
The payment processor is in Ohio - 2Checkout.com. Reviewing their site (and Google) they seem to be a legitimate company and their FAQ implies that consumers will receive refunds if the merchant can't prove delivery of the product.
Not to say this is all true -- I want to believe it, but as others have said - sounds like a little much for the price.
Calling BS on that one. Or, your idea of a "performance issue" and mine are vastly different.
I have two machines on my desk here at work. One is XP Pro with a gig of RAM, and I use it as my primary system. Outlook, Word, Excel, SQL Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer, and several other applications are running on a regular basis and I have no real issues with it. It bogs down occasionally, but only when I'm pushing it to perform a few tasks at once.
The other machine runs Vista Business with 512 of RAM. I use it for testing sites in IE7, and casual browsing in Firefox. It routinely freezes completely for 10-60 seconds if I do something as simple as scroll down the page in Firefox. And don't jump to blaming Firefox for that one - I've tweaked the memory usage as much as possible and it's currently sitting at 90MB used for 6 tabs - Not too shabby for a modern browser. Opening a new tab in IE7 takes 10-15 seconds. Minimizing one browser and pulling up the other can take a minute (literally). Locking the PC (Win-L) randomly takes anywhere from 30 seconds to a full minute.
Vista looks nice, but the truth is, it's a hog. Barely usable on 512MB. I couldn't even stand the lack of responsiveness when I (briefly) ran it at home with 2GB of RAM, but I'll accept that I was probably being too picky on that one.
I'll second that. My Thinkpad has both, but I can't bring myself to use the touchpad for anything. I even tried out the advanced settings that let me use it just for scrolling, but I always fall back to middle button + eraser. I get much more precision and speed with a minuscule fraction of the movement and effort.
You're right, the new system is largely related to Nextel's billing platform - trust me, significant improvement over what Sprint used previously. There were subtle changes though, and a new "wrapper" on top of it that is supposed to make it easier to access functions. I participated in training for our call center (Nextel, so we knew a lot of the system already). I received 3 days of training from Sprint/Nextel, which I then had to condense down to 2, and later 1.5 days of training for our specialists. The first week we were running the new system was a trainwreck, and these were former Nextel representatives who, like I said, were familiar with the underlying system already.
Former Sprint staff went through the same process - When I was being trained by Sprint/Nextel there were a few Sprint CDMA employees there preparing to teach their representatives. They had never seen anything remotely like the system before in their lives, and had to start supporting customers in it with about 2 days of training (with very little hands-on time because the training environments were very flaky).
Not that it wasn't a mess -- Just blame the company for a poorly planned transition (that is still going on, btw - Not all markets are switched, so some of the customers from TFA might be affected by the transition), not the representatives for struggling with a new billing system.
Icing on the cake - The new interface is Java based, pulled down over the network in IE, but changes still need to be implemented in the older billing system, via an ICA client buried in the Java/HTML. It averages around 250MB memory consumption on our XP Pro workstations with 512MB of RAM. So even if you get an intelligent CSR, expect to wait awhile for the system to catch up with them.
I worked as a customer care supervisor on the Nextel side of Sprint/Nextel up until a transfer to IT two months ago. We were just starting the dropped call credit policy when I left - I only remember ballpark amounts, but there is no way to pay your bill using that system. The specialists issue a two or three minute "bonus" to the account for each dropped call, up to a maximum of about 30 minutes in a billing period.
Of course, we were told that the maximum amount was not to be disclosed to the customers, so maybe people are calling frequently to try and cover their overages in full.
The problem with customer service is that you only hear from people with problems. While their is serious effort made to resolve every issue on the first call, many times a customer has a perceived issue (bought the cheapest plan possible and used my phone 24/7 is a common one) that can't be resolved in the manner that they want -- So they keep calling back until getting some sucker who waives the overages.
Not to say all calls were because of dumb customers - I worked for them (indirectly, outsourced customer care) but I would never use the service myself.
Since when does regedit support loading an entire hive, as opposed to a registry patch file (*.reg)? Loading a registry hive
To load or unload registry hives, use Registry Editor. The Load Hive... and Unload Hive... commands affect only the HKEY_USERS and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE keys and are active only when these predefined keys are selected.
When you load a hive into the registry, the hive becomes a subkey of one of these keys.
To load a hive into the registry
Open Registry Editor.
Click either the HKEY_USERS key or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key.
On the File menu, click Load Hive....
Find the hive you want to load and click it.
Click Open.
In Key Name, type the name that you want to assign to the hive and then click OK.
Unloading a registry hive To unload a registry hive
Open Registry Editor
Select a hive that you have previously loaded onto your system
I'm in the first teier of support at Nextel -- We haven't heard a word of this until about 24 hours ago. A dedicated group was trained to support the trial, and if this rolls out full scale, that group would just be expanded (following the pattern of past trials for specialized services, and the current method of supporting data services). Nextel likes to compartmentalize everything as much as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Different price -- Processing fees? They were mentioned by another comment above.
The payment processor is in Ohio - 2Checkout.com. Reviewing their site (and Google) they seem to be a legitimate company and their FAQ implies that consumers will receive refunds if the merchant can't prove delivery of the product.
Not to say this is all true -- I want to believe it, but as others have said - sounds like a little much for the price.
Can anyone (Swedish?) confirm this list of other projects from their corporate site: http://www.medison.se/productseng.html ?
"We have reason to believe that Al Qaeda operatives have established a secret base in the caves of Mars. ... "
We'd be landing troops next month.
Calling BS on that one. Or, your idea of a "performance issue" and mine are vastly different.
I have two machines on my desk here at work. One is XP Pro with a gig of RAM, and I use it as my primary system. Outlook, Word, Excel, SQL Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer, and several other applications are running on a regular basis and I have no real issues with it. It bogs down occasionally, but only when I'm pushing it to perform a few tasks at once.
The other machine runs Vista Business with 512 of RAM. I use it for testing sites in IE7, and casual browsing in Firefox. It routinely freezes completely for 10-60 seconds if I do something as simple as scroll down the page in Firefox. And don't jump to blaming Firefox for that one - I've tweaked the memory usage as much as possible and it's currently sitting at 90MB used for 6 tabs - Not too shabby for a modern browser. Opening a new tab in IE7 takes 10-15 seconds. Minimizing one browser and pulling up the other can take a minute (literally). Locking the PC (Win-L) randomly takes anywhere from 30 seconds to a full minute.
Vista looks nice, but the truth is, it's a hog. Barely usable on 512MB. I couldn't even stand the lack of responsiveness when I (briefly) ran it at home with 2GB of RAM, but I'll accept that I was probably being too picky on that one.
I'll second that. My Thinkpad has both, but I can't bring myself to use the touchpad for anything. I even tried out the advanced settings that let me use it just for scrolling, but I always fall back to middle button + eraser. I get much more precision and speed with a minuscule fraction of the movement and effort.
In the representatives defense ...
You're right, the new system is largely related to Nextel's billing platform - trust me, significant improvement over what Sprint used previously. There were subtle changes though, and a new "wrapper" on top of it that is supposed to make it easier to access functions. I participated in training for our call center (Nextel, so we knew a lot of the system already). I received 3 days of training from Sprint/Nextel, which I then had to condense down to 2, and later 1.5 days of training for our specialists. The first week we were running the new system was a trainwreck, and these were former Nextel representatives who, like I said, were familiar with the underlying system already.
Former Sprint staff went through the same process - When I was being trained by Sprint/Nextel there were a few Sprint CDMA employees there preparing to teach their representatives. They had never seen anything remotely like the system before in their lives, and had to start supporting customers in it with about 2 days of training (with very little hands-on time because the training environments were very flaky).
Not that it wasn't a mess -- Just blame the company for a poorly planned transition (that is still going on, btw - Not all markets are switched, so some of the customers from TFA might be affected by the transition), not the representatives for struggling with a new billing system.
Icing on the cake - The new interface is Java based, pulled down over the network in IE, but changes still need to be implemented in the older billing system, via an ICA client buried in the Java/HTML. It averages around 250MB memory consumption on our XP Pro workstations with 512MB of RAM. So even if you get an intelligent CSR, expect to wait awhile for the system to catch up with them.
I worked as a customer care supervisor on the Nextel side of Sprint/Nextel up until a transfer to IT two months ago. We were just starting the dropped call credit policy when I left - I only remember ballpark amounts, but there is no way to pay your bill using that system. The specialists issue a two or three minute "bonus" to the account for each dropped call, up to a maximum of about 30 minutes in a billing period.
Of course, we were told that the maximum amount was not to be disclosed to the customers, so maybe people are calling frequently to try and cover their overages in full.
The problem with customer service is that you only hear from people with problems. While their is serious effort made to resolve every issue on the first call, many times a customer has a perceived issue (bought the cheapest plan possible and used my phone 24/7 is a common one) that can't be resolved in the manner that they want -- So they keep calling back until getting some sucker who waives the overages.
Not to say all calls were because of dumb customers - I worked for them (indirectly, outsourced customer care) but I would never use the service myself.
To load or unload registry hives, use Registry Editor. The Load Hive... and Unload Hive... commands affect only the HKEY_USERS and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE keys and are active only when these predefined keys are selected.
When you load a hive into the registry, the hive becomes a subkey of one of these keys.
To load a hive into the registry
Unloading a registry hive
To unload a registry hive
I'm in the first teier of support at Nextel -- We haven't heard a word of this until about 24 hours ago. A dedicated group was trained to support the trial, and if this rolls out full scale, that group would just be expanded (following the pattern of past trials for specialized services, and the current method of supporting data services). Nextel likes to compartmentalize everything as much as possible.