real statements made by Circuit City salespeople this weekend

Following up on my last post, here's a list of actual statements made by three Circuit City computer salesman at two stores. Most of these were made by a thirtyish dude with a goatee named Mike at the Union Square store, which I will be avoiding in the future. (All but one of these quotes were made by sales staff at that store.)

--"Laptop batteries don't last more than a year and a half. And within a year, you'll be lucky to have a charge of more than an hour." After I pointed out that my previous laptop, bought about two-and-a-half years ago, still got pretty good battery life: "That's ancient history. The new processors eat much more power, it's like night and day." According to a friend who repairs computers for a living, the new processors may be even better than the older processors in terms of battery life.
--"When you do replace your battery for any of these laptops, the only way to get it is through the manufacturer and it costs $300, $350." In the SAME STORE they had laptop batteries on sale for about $120, which seems to be the going rate.
--"You want this computer instead. If you care at all about battery life, the AMD chip is much better than the Celeron chip." My source says the two chips are both designed for laptops and should be comparable in terms of battery life.
--"You don't want this computer. It's only 32 bit. The new Windows operating system is coming out this summer and it only runs on 64 bit computers. You know what that means? That means that if you buy this computer now, it's going to be completely obsolete in about four months." By all accounts, the new Windows will be able to run on 32-bit computers as well as 64. And who says your computer is "obsolete" if you're not running the latest Windows?! I've always ran outdated versions of Windows on my computers without much of a problem.
--"If you don't buy our anti-virus software package [preinstalled at about $120!] you're taking a gigantic risk as soon as this computer gets online. It's hard for me in good conscience to let you walk out of the store without this package." You can buy anti-virus software (at other retailers) for about $20 after rebate and install it yourself. Though you don't even need to do that... (see next point).
--"NONE of the new computers come with any kind of anti-virus software anymore." As labeled clearly on the floor model computer itself, the computer I bought (and many of the others on sale) had Norton Internet Security software pre-loaded. This is one of the most popular anti-virus software programs.
--"This computer only has 60 GB of hard drive space. Anything less than 80 is really lacking." This was said to a middle-aged woman, who would need all of that extra space for what, her gigantic collection of MP3s?
--"Stay away from Sony. Sony is bad, bad, bad." I actually don't know for sure whether or not Sony is bad, bad, bad, but considering the source, I doubt the salesperson who said this meant "bad for the customer" as much as "bad for Circuit City" in some way.

That's just what I picked up on--I'm not exactly a computer whiz, so I'm sure I missed more.

The moral of the story? Computer salesman are the used car salesman of the new millennium. Just because they're geeky doesn't mean they're harmless.

NOTE: In the interest of fairness, I should mention that at the end of the day I did walk away with the computer I wanted, at an excellent price. But it wasn't easy.