First of all thank you very much for trying to boost my  ego with all your "Nice Wok!", "Appreciate the effort you put in to this" comments. But, the fact of the matter is, it's getting a bit old and really annoying. So, cut it out.

k?

tx,

- Sameera.

I have always been very careful as to which sites I trust with my credit card. But unfortunately, working under stress to complete an assignment for my MBA, I gave out my CC number in order to signup for a 7 day trial account for the seemingly legit HighBeam.com. There was one article which was interested in and the site was preventing me from reading the rest without a membership. So I signed up, read the article, had the membership around for 2-3 days till I completed the assignment. Then I went ahead and canceled it. First time I tried, the site stopped responding. So, I refreshed the page went ahead and clicked on the Cancel Account button again. This time the site, logged me off and returned me to the general articles page. So, I assumed everything was fine.

Just yesterday, my Credit Card company called me up and informed me that HighBeam has billed me $199. I immediately informed them to block any other transactions from the card and went ahead and checked the account. And sure enough the account was active. They have not canceled the account, nor had they sent any emails informing the end of trial period was coming up. Worse yet, I have not received a mail informing me of the money they charged me. I have dealt with many companies over the Internet and it's standard practice of each to send out clear messages informing you before they proceed with routine billing.

A section of their help reads 'If you are not able to successfully use the online tool, please contact our 24-hour toll-free customer support line at 1-800-860-9227.' So they run this 'trial' acknowledging their online cancellation is failing at times?? Isn't that exactly why they should be sending emails before they bill trial users?

Little bit of Googling suggested that I'm not the only person who's been ripped off by this dodgy company.

http://www.ripoffreport.com/searchresults.asp?q5=highbeam

http://www.ripoffreport.com/searchresults.asp?q5=highbeam.com

About 2 months ago, my HP TX1000 Tablet PC started to hang every now and then. It started with BSODs often sighting the nVidia display adapter as the culprit. When Vista SP1 came along, the BSODs went away. They were replaced with a sudden white screen which gradually degraded into a screen of black and white alternative vertical bars. The problem finally escalated to the point the tablet would not boot at all.

I looked all over the Internet, called HP Support but couldn't get it resolved. Finally, HP asked me to ship the TX to US (country of purchase) so they could take a look at it. Finding this to be the final solution, I was looking around for the best method to do so. HP quite helpfully told me to ship it to their nearest service depot (which is in India), so that they could take care of the shipping from there. But, in the meantime I went ahead and spoke to e-wis, the local business partner for IBM and a leading dealer for HP, Lexmark and host of other products. The good people there promised to fix it up under warranty, with no charge to me.

Well, after about a month, my beloved tablet PC back with a new motherboard and is running smoothly. I almost had lost faith on getting it fixed. But, here I am typing away on machine that I almost left for dead. :)