How do you know what to buy? I mean how do you get your technical advice on what monitor to buy, what portable cd burner to buy, TV, mp3 player, dvd recorder etc etc…

Me I do searches on the internet, but I still can’t decide. I check reviews on cnet.com and any other reviewing sites I can find, preferably in the UK but more often than not they are Stateside – which means that I go through all the reviews, decide on something and then, 9 times out of 10, find out that it’s either not available in Europe or it’s at least double the price.

It’s very annoying.

Then once you’ve spent 25 hours researching something, you place an order, only to discover (usually by accident) that 50% of the past customers think that the company is the best thing since sliced bread, but the other 50% would happily chop the balls off any one of the senior management team due to incredibly bad, obnoxious, deceptive customer service, poor delivery, or even more common – no delivery.

You can’t win.

I bit the bullet today and ordered a monitor over the internet. I’ve been watching the ‘order progress’ icon every 5 minutes for the last 3 hours and it hasn’t changed once. Maybe I would have been better paying the extra £50 and placing my order with a person instead?