In today’s post I am going to share with you how to get a free upgrade on your new Dell Laptop. This is based on my personal experience, so if you are intending on purchasing a Dell Laptop anytime soon, now is a good time to do it, since I will show you a loophole to get a free upgrade

This is what happened. I placed an order for two Dell Inspiron 1420 laptops on the Dell Online Store at www.dell.com.my. The order completed successfully. However,  the next day, a Dell sales personnel called me to tell me that the Dell Inspiron 1420 is out of production, and they will give the exact same specifications but on the Dell Studio 14 laptop for the same price!

I did a quick check and with the same specifications as the Inspiron 1420, the Studio 14 was costing about RM 500 more. So here I was being offered a free RM 500 upgrade! I asked the sales personnel if the model was out of production, then why still offer it online? That’s when she explained that Dell Online store is actually beyond their direct control and the offers they place are for 3 months at a time.

So, ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is what I call a window of opportunity! I just checked, and the Insipiron 1420 is still being offered at RM 2499 with a Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz processor, 3GB RAM, 320GB HDD, WiFi, Bluetooth, 2 MP Webcam, DVDRW Drive, the works! And the best part is that if you order, they cannot deliver it to you since its out of production and you will get these specs in the Studio 14 laptop.

So, if you want a free upgrade to your brand new Dell laptop, now is the time to grab it!

I have been using AVG for a good number of years now and it has worked trouble-free for me. Out of the blue, a couple of days ago, a strange thing began happening to my AVG 8 Free Edition antivirus. It would refuse to update itself. A popup kept appearing saying Update failed. The connection with update server has failed.

Initially, I thought it was just due to the update server being too busy, with AVG boasting over 80 millions users worldwide. The next day, the symptoms were exactly the same, and I thought there was something wrong with my Internet connection, or perhaps the updater was being blocked by the firewall. I quickly ruled that out when it still would not update even using my wireless connection at home.

A search on Google revealed many other disgruntled users with the same problem, but no solution was to be seen. I then decided to check through every option in the Tools…Advanced Settings menu in AVG. Under the Update settings, I discovered that a checkbox saying ‘Use dial-up connections’  had somehow become selected. I unchecked this and restarted AVG, and voila! It was hungrily downloading the updates it had been deprived of the past few days.

So if you don’t know why your AVG 8 antivirus decides to stop updating all of a sudden, double check this setting to make sure it didn’t get switched on somehow.