[rescue] SCSI/IDE laptop adapters: outcome

[der Mouse]

Back on August 25th, I wrote of a possible group buy of adapters to
take a laptop IDE disk and use it in a machine expecting a laptop SCSI
disk.  One person (you know who you are, and thank you very much) wrote
to one of these lists and named a vendor that carried them as of a day
or two earlier (the post said something like "I just ordered a few
more"); interestingly enough, it was the very vendor who had denied all
knowledge of them on the phone to me: MCE Technologies, LLC,
mcetech.com, +1 949 458 0800, or, in the NANPA, 1-800-500-0622.  (I
can't speak to the validity of the 949-458-0800 number; I used the
800-500-0622 number when calling as outlined below.)

However, this post also named an MCE Tech part number for them
("sta-idescsi25", and indeed the invoice copy packed with the devices
says "STA-IDESCSI25" in the "Item No." column).  So I called them
again, and, not letting on I'd called before, asked about them by that
number.  They said they had some in stock, so I ordered two.  They
arrived today, and as far as I can tell are exactly what I wanted: I
have a Toshiba laptop IDE drive of slightly over 4G in my Voyager right
now using one of them.

I did hear from some people wanting into the group buy.  MCE said on
the phone that they ship worldwide (they use FedEx, or at least they
did for me), and their price of (US)$20 is enough below the $65 I was
expecting to pay that I daresay anyone who was willing to join the
group buy can just order directly and still come out ahead.  (Usual
disclaimers apply - I have no relationship with them other than that of
customer with supplier, etc.)

They did get one thing wrong: they asked whether I'd rather have
express or ground shipping, and I'm quite sure I said ground, but they
shipped express anyway.  The extra cost was a little annoying, but
still got me two of them for about what I was expecting to pay for one,
so I'm not kicking - but anyone who wants non-express shipping might
want to be fairly emphatic about it.

(As before, I'm setting a reply-to to a bitbucket; please fix up your
to-line if you're replying, to point to the list or person to whom you
intend to reply.)

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B