Yes, it’s true, that’s $21.99 on my receipt for a quart of maple syrup from my supermarket the other day. I nearly dropped the jug when the handheld scanner displayed the price. My next thought was that it was a mistake. But no, the display tag agreed. The smaller jugs had a wildly higher unit price so into the cart it went.
And there I thought fuel was expensive! Silly me.
I don’t get it. The trend is supposed to be toward zero. Toward cost reduction, toward savings, resource conservation, and so on and so forth.
I’m a big fan of rebates. Yeah, I’m one of those folks that actually sends ’em in and keeps track of whether or not they pay off. (They always do pay off, by the way.) By the end of the year they make for a pretty good return for the few minutes it takes to satisfy the requirements.
Yesterday’s mail brought the latest one. But instead of the usual check there was a thick envelope containing a Visa debit card.
The card was adhered to a cover letter, printed single-sided on heavy stock. The envelope also contained a Know Before You Go! insert explaining a few situations where you might expect difficulties using the card, like restaurants (where they typically pre-authorize an amount that includes gratuities) and gas stations (where the card simply won’t authorize at the pump). Finally, a tri-fold Cardholder Agreement: “IMPORTANT – PLEASE READ CAREFULLY” it implored, followed by dense, tiny print that covering both sides of the unfolded page.
Instead of the eyestrain I turned to the log. It all started when the 8+-year-old network switch in Damian‘s room finally failed. (I wasn’t unhappy; the failed switch was the last piece of stuff less than gigabit speed on the wired LAN. I wondered how many frames that old Linksys beast had switched in its lifetime…) Anyway, the Netgear replacement was on sale for about $36, then there was this $10 rebate. The rebate process consisted of a quick visit to a Web page to complete a form and print the qualification sheet (maybe 2 minutes), copy/paste the address and print the envelope, fold the qualification sheet, razorblade the bar code from the box, stuff and stamp the envelope (another 2 minutes or so to ). Then the logging and tracking on my part (another minute, tops).
The value of the whole thing? Ten bucks. All that stuff had to have cost Netgear more than that to process, produce, mail and track. Not to mention the involvement Parago, Inc., who runs Netgear’s ProSafe Rebate Center, and Visa International.
The old checks were easy to handle; just shove it into a convenient ATM and be done with it. Now there’s this card to bulge my wallet, another value to keep track of and – oh yeah – that trifold of fine print. (Where can I use it? Where can’t I? It says ‘debit’ but they said use it like credit. Hmmm.) And I’d better remember to use it before it expires. Wait a minute, expires? It’s good through October of 2011, it’s embossed right there on the plastic, but in that Fine Print…
Account Maintenance Fee: Subject to applicable law, a fee will be applied to all accounts each month, after the six month anniversary date. The charge will be recurring each month until the balance of the account is $0.00.
So, considering that the Account Maintenance Fee is $3.00, if the card sits on my desk unused then on May 2, 2011 it’ll be worth $7. On June 2, $4. August 1, $1. And finally, on July 2, $0. Hey! For three months and 29 days – from the date the fees drain it dry until the thing expires – the card will have no value at all!
So I don’t get it. Can someone explain who makes out on these things? I mean, I understand coupons. Print a lot, the redemption rate’s pretty low (Groupon fiascos excepted – small companies have been nearly put out of business!) But these? I’m sure Visa gets paid, but beyond that it baffles the mind.
Looks like there might be a Frank Zappa fan over at Orange County Choppers. Seen their new t-shirt?
I’d argue that the iconic Zappa mustache logo is far more famous and certainly has been around a lot longer.
Now that’s a famous mustache! What’s more, it’s been copyrighted by the Zappa Family Trust. Hey, Paul, better be careful. Y’know, Gail Zappa‘s got quite the reputation for defending all things Zappa. Wasn’t that long ago Gail sued a… Zappa fan club, of all things… over their use of the mustache in promoting their annual “Zappanale” festival. (Okay, ZFT lost that one largely, as far as I can tell, on technicalities.) Your pockets are deeper, I’m bettin’, and you’re right here in the good ‘ol USofA rather than Germany.
I don’t know what to make of this oldie-but-goodie – Toyota.
In this day where consumer-class terabyte drives approach the fifty buck price point, this Corvus ad from April 1981 seemed worthy of sharing.
Five million bytes at the newly-lowered price of $3750. That’s thirty seven hundred and fifty dollars, not a typo.
Just last week I was in an email discussion with a friend and he lamented the “good old days.” I’m not so sure that the old days were all that good. Did you have four large burning a hole in your pocket for storage back in 1981? I sure didn’t.
Yesterday the folks at the parts counter over at Highroads  Harley-Davidson in Highland Park blew me away. I had a short list of stuff that I needed for Pam‘s Deluxe and I pushed it across the counter as I said hello. The surprise came when he returned – every single item was in stock!
Those of you that have used this dealership for any length of time have certainly experienced for yourself how often you need to place an order. When Liberty bought the place they said to expect improvements. It looks like that’s actually happening.
Thinking back, the number of times that I need to place orders for common parts has indeed been going down. I used to complain quite a bit, but I guess those days are coming to a close.
Go check them out for yourself!
I wrote a while back about the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive, which purports to combine the advantages of a solid state drive with the low cost of a conventional drive. It works very well!
I decided to take the next step to see if I could wring a little bit more performance out of the thing. Since last fall’s build as a single-drive system, the desktop had become storage-rich. Besides the recently added Momentus XT there’s the original 750 GB Western Digital and a Seagate 1 TB, the latter used, well, for not much of anything. Relocating the data from the Momentus XT should allow Seagate’s algorithm to place OS and application files on the XT’s flash for lightning-fast reads.
There was only several hundred GB of data to move but it took a few days of here-and-there time to get the job done safely and completely. The system is used for real work. There were backup routines to change (and test!), path dependencies to chase down, stuff like that. But eventually it was done – with the bonus of some much-needed cleanup and organization.
So, what was the result? Windows 7 Professional boot times – BIOS to desktop – are on the order of 25 seconds. Ambitious application loads, full Photoshop for example, are down to just a few seconds. The system is powered down within 15 seconds of clicking Shutdown. I’m thinking these may even improve over time.
A few weeks back I read of Seagate‘s Momentus XT hybrid hard drive. What’s a hybrid? It combines a conventional hard drive with a small SSD in one standard-size, standard interface package. The idea is that the conventional hard drive provides useful capacity while the SSD provides a significant performance boost. To the Operating System, the drive simply appears as any other drive. There’s no special OS support or drivers needed either; for instance, no need for TRIM support. Seagate has developed a special algorithm – they call it “Adaptive Memory Technology” – which purports to analyze use patterns and optimize the use of the SSD portion of the drive. What you use most often is stored in flash for best performance. The end result is supposed to be a drive that delivers much of the performance of an SSD at a cost that won’t break the bank.
The Seagate Web site might not be the best place to find objective comparisons, but check out the video (scroll down to the headline Compare solid state hybrid drives to SSD and HDD.) to see some impressive performance.
When I built my last desktop I (briefly) considered a pure SSD for the boot drive but decided against it. The cost was crazy high and the capacity was crazy low. When I read of the Momentus XT it didn’t take much to convince me to give one a try.
I decided on the ST95005620AS as a replacement boot drive. This is the 500 GB unit and, other than the built-in 4 GB SLC NAND SSD, it has some fairly conventional specifications – not at all unlike the Western Digital WD7501AALS it replaced. These drives are new, so it was a couple of weeks to wait for stock. I’m fortunate in that Newegg has a local distribution facility; once a drive was available it arrived the next day.
My desktop case (a Cooler Master HAF 932 #RC-932-KKN1-GP) doesn’t provide mounts for 2.5-inch drives so I picked up some adapter rails, too. These rails will hold two 2.5-inch drives but there are a couple of quirks. They use some odd-sized screws (supplied) and the holes were too small for my no-tool drive mounts. I mounted the hybrid in one of the front-accessible bays with the supplied screws. I may eventually drill and tap the rails for standard screws and relocate it to the drive cage for a cleaner cable layout.
I have a few applications for cloning boot drives. I don’t like any of them so I decided to try Seagate’s DiscWizard tool (made by Acronis), free for the download. Installation was quick and painless. But the clone process failed every time! Shame on me for believing you could do a low-level task like that from inside Windows. Fortunately DiscWizard provides a tool to build bootable utility media. I used it to configure a USB drive, booted from it and in short order I had my clone. In my case the target drive was smaller than the multiply partitioned source drive, but the DiscWizard handled it perfectly.
Now, cloning a boot drive is faster and worlds more convenient than doing an IPL from scratch, but it’s not without problems. Sometimes, if you run application software that requires activation, it may notice that the hardware’s changed and void your activation. I had several of those but all were resolved in short order. It’s just something to be aware of. Check your application load and have your necessary licensing information at the ready if you need to contact your vendors.
Okay, so how’s the Momentus XT work? Very well! What’s more, it seems to be getting even better over time. It’s weird.
Boot time is about half what it was with the old drive. It’s dead quiet, too, where the Western Digital is one noisy unit when it seeks, at least in my cavernous case. For the applications I use all the time, first-use loads are near instantaneous. Under Windows 7, the drive part of the Experience Index remained unchanged from my earlier drive but that didn’t surprise me because the specifications are virtually identical. The real difference is first-use of applications and data. There the performance boost is definitely not something you need to try to notice; it’s that obvious.
The jury’s still out on long-term reliability. I only buy Seagate and Western Digital drives, and I’ve had more Seagate failures over the years. To be fair, warranty service from both vendors is always as quick and easy as you can expect.
This isn’t a pure SSD, but Seagate appears to deliver on its promise with the Momentus XT: much of the bang of an SSD with significantly less cost, reasonable capacity and transparent Operating System support. Performance increases are right where you notice it most, on the stuff you use most often. The Momentus XT is positioned as a laptop drive but with these specs it works equally well for desktop applications.
Go and get yourself one of these, you won’t be disappointed.
The other day I set aside some time to clean up my Dyna. For way too long – like since our stormy tour in the Poconos last August – it’s been the dirty bike in the garage. Not very fitting for a 105th anniversary numbered Wide Glide! Cleanup was long overdue.
As I collected my detailing materials I came across some Harley-Davidson branded cleaners. These are starter pack samples that the motor company hands out with new bikes. I’ve got a bunch of these, never opened, on the shelf.
The Harley Care Starter Set (94671-99A) consists of four products: Sunwash Concentrate, Bug Remover, Wheel & Tire Cleaner and Harley Gloss. All are labeled Biodegradable. What better time to check ’em out?
I mixed a batch of wash solution from the Sunwash Concentrate. The label states it’s formulated for use in direct sunlight, on all surfaces. It seemed perfect for this day’s weather – direct sunlight in the mid 60s. The product made some nice foamy water. But it wasn’t cutting the Dyna’s crud so I doubled up on the concentrate. That helped. I wash with plenty of water, keeping surfaces wet until I’m ready to break out the dryer but it didn’t matter. The result of the Sunwash Concentrate was tons of water spots. No harm, no foul, I’ve never used any wash solution that didn’t leave spots. The road crud was gone, though.
Next I broke out the Harley Gloss. They call it a UV Protective Detailer. It conveniently applies from a spray bottle, also safe for all surfaces. I also grabbed the bottle of Bug Remover. The box says that acid from insect bodies can damage surface finishes if not removed quickly. I’m not so sure I agree with that. I mean, maybe the damage can be measured somehow, but it’s never been visible to *my* eye. I got started. Know what I found? Neither product was anywhere near as effective as what I usually use following a wash! In fact, they kind of sucked. The Bug Remover just plain didn’t remove the crusty, hardened bugs. And the Harley Gloss was tricky to use according to the label: apply via rag or spray, wipe dry before it dries on the surface. It just plain didn’t work. I tried for maybe ten minutes before abandoning it for my preferred product.
By now you’re probably wondering what miracle product I use for a nice post-wash finish. Are you ready? Here it is. Lemon Pledge. (Link edited in December 2011. It looks like their product has changed, at least in the design of the container.)
There are no substitutes. It’s got to be this brand. And lemon, no other flavor will do. There must be something in that particular formula that has all the necessary attributes. It works on all surfaces, on all kinds of crud. (You still need to wash off the abrasive road dirt – with plenty of water – or risk scratching, but there’s no way around that step.) There are only two places I don’t recommend Lemon Pledge, for obvious reasons: the seat and tires. But paint, chrome, rubber and plastic, anywhere else is fair game.
The pre-soaked wipes will work, but I much prefer the spray. Use two clean cotton rags: one to apply and one to polish. As the polish rag gets laden and polishing becomes difficult, rotate it to become the application rag. Discard the original application rag and bring in a new polish rag. Don’t skimp on the rags! Use lots of ’em.
Shake the Lemon Pledge can well, often. Spray generously on the application rag. Wipe gently. It dissolves bugs and loosens tar, but stubborn areas might require multiple applications. Don’t be afraid to use plenty of spray. Hard surfaces (unlike your furniture) will not acquire a buildup! But resist rubbing too hard, let the product do the work. If you think you need more just spay the rag again and continue. Finally, with the clean, soft, dry rag, buff.
And those water spots? Erased, leaving a nice, crud-resistant finish that makes your next cleanup easier.
Actually, the solution’s been built into my Harley-Davidsons (and all other street motorcycles) for a little bit less than forever. Well, since they legislated standardized controls, in any case.
What is it? It’s a real, honest-to-goodness stop switch.
Unlike Toyota‘s Prius, this switch is located right where it belongs, just a short reach for your right thumb, the switch produces immediate, predictable, certain results.
The engine stops.
You don’t need to hunt for the button. You don’t need to hold it for 30 seconds. Because when you need to stop the engine you need to stop the engine, and every millisecond counts.
There you have it!
Where’s my prize? Edmunds? Obama? Who’s got it?
I found these pictures in my phone when I was getting ready for a firmware update. I meant to write about ’em earlier but I guess I never got around to it.
This hung scanner was stuck in the rack (kind of looks like it’s stuck in a little toilet) and none of the buttons produced any response. I remember getting some funny looks as I knelt to grab the images.
I still like the system because it saves me time, even if I’m only in the store for a few items. I’ve been audited a few times. The audits, at least in my limited experiences, are more of a wave-of-the-hand than anything.
Other stuff about my encounters with Scan-It are here and here.
This morning brought a little bit of snow. Last night it was said that it was supposed to be a huge honkin’ storm but it turned out to be not much snow at all, just a dusting. Pam went outside to get the newspaper, as she usually does on Saturday morning, but came back inside empty-handed. “There’s no fuckin’ paper,” she muttered disgustedly, partially to me and partially to the Universe.
A little while later I was checking the weather maps to see what had happened to our storm and collecting the morning email. Here was something from the paper:
Good Morning from the Home News Tribune!
We’re experiencing possible delays throughout our delivery area today, December 19, 2009 due to the current weather conditions. We apologize for the inconvenience; however you can access our e-edition immediately by visiting […]
A couple of years back the paper took the decision to outsource delivery to some faceless fulfillment company. And years earlier than that they stopped the practice of using neighborhood kids on the street. Each change has brought a corresponding drop in service levels.
Anyway, those kids earned their tips. (I wrote about newspapers and delivery gratuities last year, too.) Weather? It just didn’t matter; the newspaper was delivered and that was that. I think our parents called it “responsibility”.
Our e-edition is an exact replica of the printed version that will be delivered to you later today.
And it is, I guess, but the navigation is clunky and you can’t fold it up on the dining room table while you enjoy breakfast and coffee. Also implied is that they intend an eventual delivery, but they’re already four or five hours late.
If you like the Home News Tribune e-edition, you may subscribe by visiting […]
Extra, or a substitute for pulp delivery? Not sure, as I write.
It happens that I just paid the bill for our subscription. Delivery performance has incremented downward and the paper itself has shrunk – actually become considerably narrower – over the past year. Yet rates had risen again. We already know they’ve outsourced delivery. Apparently they’ve also outsourced billing because my check went to a PO box in Louisville, KY. It used to go to an address down the shore.
Newspapers all over are wringing their hands over their reduced market share. The Internet is kicking their collective asses! Is it any wonder? Maybe they deserve it.
About a month and a half ago my main personal computer, an (ancient) HP zd8000 laptop, began dropping keystrokes. I traced the problem back to the battery. No longer taking a charge, the interrupts generated as the charging circuitry tried, failed and tried again were interfering with the keyboard interrupt. My typing is bad enough; I pulled the offending battery, scanned the ‘net and ordered a new battery from overstock.com based on – what else? – price.
That was September 3rd, and the replacement battery arrived some days later. Unfortunately it was the wrong one! The order showed the correct number as did the packing list, but the thing that sat on my desk clearly showed a different number. The plastic bag it came in was already open (uh oh, could mean trouble) so I took the opportunity to stick it into the laptop, thinking perhaps it was a substitute. Nope, the computer refused it.
I used the online chat on Overstock’s Web site and explained the situation. The rep thought it best to escalate to a tech person so she told me to expect their call, which came some hours later. I hadn’t expected his call so quick. The tech generated the RMA and return shipping label and said he’d overnight another replacement.
Meanwhile I did a little checking. HP has an excellent online parts lookup tool, and I used it to check the two part numbers in question. They were markedly different. I looked them both up on the Overstock site and found the descriptions to be remarkably similar. Maybe this was the problem?
As it turned out, the next few weeks proved frustrating – for both me and Overstock – as we shipped the same incorrect battery back an forth across the country three times. In the end they said that they didn’t have the correct item. They’d process my refund and I was free to keep the incorrect battery. I sent it back anyway; there’s no sense in recycling a perfectly good battery I couldn’t use.
But that’s not the end of the story. Last Friday evening I took a call from Thomas at Overstock. He explained that my case had made it up to the executive level and that they had spent some time analyzing what went wrong. There were a few things, including a mis-SKUed warehouse bin (aha!) and lapses in communication. The analysis had resulted in some process improvements and Thomas called to tell me about them. We talked for a while about things like quality and customer service. Full disclosure: Thomas offered – and I accepted – compensation for my frustration and understanding: a correct battery and some store credit. He left his email and direct phone number.
(The correct battery arrived this afternoon, shipped overnight from Overstock’s supplier. The number fits several applications; the plastic cover trim isn’t right for my particular laptop, but I have spares from previous replacements so it’s no big deal. Overstock, if you’re reading this, don’t panic – I’m good, and I appreciate all you’ve done. You might want to follow-up with the warehouse, though.)
In my experience, the larger a company becomes the less likely is becomes that a minor customer problem actually results in action. Sure, refunds and credits are common enough, but not the continuous improvement part. To do that, and more importantly, to take the additional step of reaching out to the customer after the transaction is complete is exceptional. More should follow Overstock’s example. I’ll use them again.
I’ve done some traveling this summer and the netbook I wrote about some time back has proved to be a worthy companion. The portability and battery life have more than offset the lower performance and cramped screen real estate. And the HP Mini 1000 has proven to be as reliable as a brick!
When I configured the box I chose the SSD over traditional hard drive. HDs tend not to last very long when transported via Milwaukee Vibrators. Sure, SSDs are considerably more expensive and offer less capacity, but I was looking for reliability and it’s certainly delivered that. Read speeds are fantastic, making for fast boot times even on the slow Atom processor. But small writes – the kind that Windows is famous for doing constantly – really suck.
I wanted to mention FlashFire, an SSD accelerator. According to their site, it’s “especially useful for the system using low-end SSDs.” It works. I haven’t bothered to upgrade the slow stock SSD mainly because FlashFire makes it tolerable.
Before you ask, yes, additional buffering can leave you with an increased risk of data loss if a crash occurs before the flush is complete. But the dirty little secret is that the higher-performance SSDs already use on-board DRAM buffers to boost performance, so is it really all that much different? I guess it depends on your needs. For me, the tradeoff – performance for a little more risk – is worth it.
If you’re grumbling and second-guessing your SSD decision, go give FlashFire a try.
I’ll be doing some traveling this year. Usually I lug my laptop, a several-year-old desktop replacement that serves as my workaday box. With the battery and power brick it’s only, oh, around 15 pounds. That’s fine for moving around the house or even to drive to a client site, but it’s a bit much for more than that. Netbooks are growing in popularity, becoming more functional while getting better with battery life. The solid-state storage modules are durable, too – I could even carry it on the motorcycle!
I checked out a few of ’em before settling on the Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000. The clincher was the keyboard which at some 92% normal size is actually quite usable. So here’s the configuration: Atom processor N270 (1.6 GHz); 1 GB DDR2 RAM; 32 GB SSD; Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950; 10.1 inch SD LED BrightView Infinity display (1024×576) with built-in microphone and webcam; Wireless G / Bluetooth; 6-cell lithium-polymer battery; mini-sleeve for carrying/storage.
I ordered directly from HP and delivery was fast, as usual. The shipping box was well-packed. It took but a couple of minutes to unpack, install the battery, plug in the charger and begin setup. The first thing I noticed was that SSDs are damned slow. Could it have been a mistake to choose a low-capacity SSD over a traditional hard drive? (I’ll come back to that later.) But getting Widows XP setup, activated and updated took hours. Thankfully it required no attention while it went about its business. I left it to its own, came back later and it was done.
Over the next few days my disappointment with performance continued. It looked nice, it was light enough, the keyboard was great, battery life was excellent at around 6 hours, but what good is all that if you can’t get useful work out of the thing?
As it turns out there are many things you can do to speed things up. Memory always helps Windows. The first order of business was to swap a 2 GB stick into the single slot, which took literally 30 seconds. I attacked the Registry, making the myriad tweaks I customarily make. The filesystem adjustments, like disabling 8.3 filenames, proved particularly useful, as did things like moving the kernel into RAM.
I found a process, StacSV.exe, that was consuming CPU and doing lots of I/O. I learned that the purpose of this was to monitor the audio jack to detect if you plug in or remove headphones. This is controlled by the Audio Service so I stopped it, setting it to Manual start. There are three associated registry keys, which do not exist, that were constantly being hit (and not found), so stopping the service quieted that noise down nicely. Here are those three keys:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnService
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnGroup
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnTag
I updated the BIOS from F.10 to F.11 F.
There wasn’t much shovel-ware preinstalled on the box, but it still needed cleanup. (When will they learn?) Anyway, removing Roxio Back On Track was very straightforward. Thanks, but I’ve already got backup strategies in place.
The next was not as easy. MigoMobile Desktop 4 was apparently missing its MSI file and wouldn’t uninstall. However, they ship an installable copy of the software buried in the Program Files directory tree and it was easy to extract the missing MSI file on another machine, copy it back and perform the uninstall without resorting to mucking about with the installer database. I did still need to manually empty out the Program Files folder, delete the Start menu stuff and so on.
Oh, and then there was Microsoft’s dumbed-down productivity stuff. Is that still called Works? Didn’t matter, I removed it, too, without paying much attention.
And now, with an idle process count around 30 (about half what it shipped with!) performance is quite acceptable indeed.
One thing still troubles me, though, to this day. There’s this process called HPQToaster.exe and there’s just no quality information about it anywhere. According to my probes it is active. Because references to it are all over the Registry it looks like a bear to remove. I’ve tried killing the process and preventing it from starting and neither action seems to have any noticeable effect. But WTF is HPQToaster.exe? Does anyone have a definitive answer?
Shifting gears a little, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding SSDs. This might seem obvious, but there’s no need to defragment an SSD. In fact, it even hurts! The flash memory in an SSD has a finite lifetime, and the controller manages wear by spreading use across the array. So even though files may appear (or not) to be contiguous to the OS, there’s really no connection to exactly where in the memory array a file’s parts are stored at any given time. (I’m not sure how this contiguous or not stuff will come into play when resizing a swap file or building a new hiberfil.sys.) There are some security implications, too, as you can’t really erase a file securely by overwriting – the ‘overwrites’ will be done by the controller to different memory locations to manage wear. If you’re concerned about file security – deleted or otherwise – I suppose you must look to encrypting the filesystem in its entirety. Performance-wise, reads are very fast, large writes are pokey by modern hard-drive standards, and the kind of I/O done by application installs and things like Windows Update are abysmally slow. I recommend taking all of that kind of work off automatic and do them manually, when you can manage the time. Seriously, it’s that slow. An Office install and subsequent updates took, for example, a few hours to complete. Thankfully, you can usually start these things and walk away, come back when it’s done. One notable exception is Google’s Chrome browser, whose automatic updates you really can’t conveniently control.
I ran across an excellent article that will teach you an awful lot about the nature of SSDs, their performance and problems, and so on. Get your geek in gear, you’ll need it. About 16,000 words.
For a little more about the performance aspects of netbooks in general, when compared to more capable notebooks, give this post [edit: link died] a quick read.
It took about four years for the seat pan of my Aeron to fail. The threads that make up the mesh of the upholstery of the thing must be engineered for strength that’s just so because once one failed, the rest quickly followed.
Hunting down the dealer I bought it from wasn’t easy. In the four years they’ve  been sold and re-formed and even changed location. But I found ’em and got the process of warranty service started.
And today, fully five weeks after my initial contact, my Aeron’s got a brandy-new seat pan and all’s well with the world. If my ass could smile, it would. My back would join in.
Kudos to HermanMiller for standing behind their products with a twelve-year warranty. Not only did they make good with my worn-out seat pan, they (well, their authorized dealer) also send a person out to my home office to repair it and cart away the packaging material. My cost? Not a nickel.
Which leads me to a question. As great as the Aeron is, the successor is supposed to be even better. The Embody is pricey: around $1,500 to start. I haven’t had the opportunity to try one. Have you? What do you think of it?