Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2005 > July > 25 > Entry
The rebate shuffle
Let’s all agree: mail-in rebates stink.
I had to put aside the laptop search because there are simply too many choices and I’m not a good impulse buyer. I’ll tell you about my adventure looking at Dell laptops at the mall in a future entry.
But what’s occupying my mind now that I’ve put the notebook search on hold is upgrading my desktop’s hard drive. I’ve got two 40 gig drives in there and space is getting a bit cramped, what with my iTunes taking up a huge chunk of space and “Battlefield 2” and “Half-Life 2” taking up some of the rest.
Swapping hard drives always scares me, but there are plenty of good pieces of software you can use the make the process easier and ship your data over to the new drive. (Most hard drives sold today come with some sort of software package to do just that.) It’s a lot easier if you can have both drives attached at the same time, or transfer to an external drive, then port your data back to the new drive.
I found out my motherboard has Serial ATA capabilities, which is a slightly faster standard of hard drive that involves a much neater, thinner cable, and the ability to combine SATA hard drives for much better performance.
This seems like the answer to my hard-drive dilemma. I’ll just slap the SATA in there and transfer my stuff directly from the IDE C: drive and boom, space dilemma solved. At least that’s the plan.
I found a good Seagate drive offer at Fry’s, but here’s the catch: it’s a great price, but only if you factor in the $60 mail-in rebate being offered. For techno nerds who shop at Fry’s regularly, you know that mail-in rebates are a huge pain, even when you fill them out relgiously and mail them in. You wait. And you wait. And sometimes, you don’t get anything back, as happened to me once with an Xbox joystick. So I did a search on rebates for this hard drive, and the feedback from Internet nerds was not good.
So I called CompUSA. They usually have a generous price-matching policy and I’ve bought things there on a price-match from Fry’s. I asked how they handle rebates on a price match. The helpful lady said that they usually price match the initial price and give you a CompUSA gift card for the rebate amount.
Your choices: Wait endlessly for a mail-in rebate that you may or may not ever get, or get an instant gift card that you can use on the spot for something else.
I think CompUSA wins this round.
(Edited to add: maybe CompUSA is better off avoiding mail-in rebates altogether.)
Permalink | | Categories: Computers, Shopping
