2009 technology holiday wish list

Every technology enthusiast has a wish list of technologies they would like. Here are a few items that are on my wish list this holiday season.

• Canon PowerShot G11
  $599.99 (CAD) at Canon eStore


• Canon PowerShot SD780 IS - Red
  $279.99 (CAD) at Canon eStore


• Acer Aspire® One D250 10.1" Netbook
  $349.99 (CAD) at Canadacomputers.com


• Asus O!Play HDP-R1
  $114.99 (CAD) at Canadacomputers.com


• Xbox 360 Universal Media Remote
  $31.99 (CAD) at Best Buy Canada

There's more to come. Enjoy and good luck with your holiday shopping.

Started shopping and decorating

Today I started shopping for Christmas gifts for my family. It turned out to be very successful. I picked up some gifts for my nephews and niece.

Every year I'm somewhat shell-shocked by the number of people out shopping. Even though I shouldn't be surprised I am. It must have something to do with all of the great sales that are going.

This year my girlfriend and I are trying something new. We're going to pool our cash together and buy a large gift. We're really interesting in the a 46" Sharp Aquos LCD HDTV. When I was out shopping I saw a couple of them in on display. They look fantastic. I'm hoping one of these big box store will hook-up a Blu-ray player so I can see the quality of the video.

When I got home from all the shopping it was time to start Christmas decorating. The Christmas tree is up and all of the ornaments are hung. The other decorations are peppered through out the house. It's starting to look very festive.

Flexing my tech muscle

A few months ago I bought a hard drive and product services plan from Futureshop.

Recently I decided to installed the hard drive because my computer was running low on disk space. That hard drive was a Seagate Barracuda 500Gb SATA drive. It was on sale at the time for $99.99(CND) so I thought it was a good deal.

After a few days of use I started getting a prompt from my bios about the hard drive.

"S.M.A.R.T status of Bad. Back-up and Replace drive."

S.M.A.R.T stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Just to be certain about the status of the drive I download some utilities from Seagate to double check. Sure enough the utilities gave me the same results. The next day I download Darik's Boot And Nuke to properly wipe the drive.

My previous experience with returning items to big box stores like Futureshop have been relatively painless. Especially when you have a product service plan. This time was different. They didn't have a hard drive in stock of the same size or features instock. I told them that I wasn't going to drive to another store and I want at hard drive tonight! But they still couldn't offer me anything but a hard drive at a different location or store credit. That didn't make me happy so I told them to give me my money back. They seemed pretty happy do give me my money back just to get me out of the store.

So I decided to hunt around online to see if I could get the save drive for less money. I was really happy I did because Canadian Computers had quite a few deals for BlackFriday. I got the same hard drive for $62.99(CND) after taxes that's a $20 dollar savings.

You can check out the BlackFriday special at Canadian Computers here.

Thank goodness for poor customer service at Futureshop.

Tonight I'm reinstalling Windows and all of my software. Which should go much faster this time because I save all of the application files.