Purchase Follow-ups: Costco Viewsonic 20″ Monitor

Posted on | March 25, 2008 |

My new monitor was delivered yesterday just as the kids and I were leaving to run our errands.  I love getting packages and I always want to put everything aside to play with new toys immediately 

But I had to be strong and stay focused on the tasks at hand.  So I didn’t get to unbox and set up the new monitor until last night.  The unboxing wasn’t too difficult  ;-)   The setting up was a breeze though the quick set-up instructions really should emphasize the order in which things should be turned on (monitor first, then computer).  That little tidbit is buried in the product’s info booklet.  Being the good IT tech that I am, I leafed through the booklet before doing anything so I got the order correct the first time.

Once the monitor was hooked up and turned on, I hit my first snag.  The display was distorted (no big surprise since this is a wide-screen monitor).  However, when I went into my control panel to choose the correct settings, the option I needed (1680×1050) wasn’t available.  The booklet mentioned this possibility and suggested that I go on-line and locate an updated driver from my computer’s manufacturer.  This proved slightly more difficult than I’d expected but I was eventually successful.  Once I had the updated driver, everything came into clear view and all was good.

The monitor’s only been on-line for about 12 hours so I can’t really give testimony regarding it’s quality.  Don’t you just hate rave reviews given after only a few minutes of use?  Most bad instant reviews are due to the user’s own incompetence and good reviews can’t be considered valid because the user simply hasn’t had time to evaluate the product over a period of time.  If I remember, I’ll report back in after a couple of months.

What I can review is my on-line purchasing experience with Costco.com.  The whole thing went smoothly from start to finish including a follow-up email from Costco.com today to confirm yesterday’s delivery.  One might view the email as unnecessary and even annoying but not me.  Suppose we’d left the house 5 minutes earlier and missed the UPS guy?  Suppose he’d left it on my front porch and someone had helped themselves to my new monitor?  I might not have discovered for another day or two that it had been delivered but that I hadn’t gotten it.  I wouldn’t hesitate to make another purchase from Costco.com.

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