That’s right, Consumerist readers! Even with your ten tips for getting support from Asus, you’re still glad you own a Mac? Let me demonstrate the stupidity of your ways: Asus makes the MacBook.

Speaking as a computer consultant, the last problem I had with an Asus motherboard was in the days of the Pentium II. My problem is that it wouldn’t take an AGP card rated at 8X, which was a standard not really conceived until the Pentium III. I can hardly blame Asus for their board’s failure to work with this unsupported, abominable combination of parts.

You want to know what my solution was? Ditching the Pentium II technology. I bought an Asus P4B533-E, manned up and upgraded to a real CPU and memory, and things just worked. Hell, all the same parts still work, and work well.

That’s why I only buy Asus PC mainboards and recommend them for my clients. I’m not a shill - just a satisfied customer and reseller. Even AsRock, a value-focused spinoff, has provided nothing but stability in low-end builds for me. If you want to see a board that you might have to call tech support over, look no further than ECS or PCChips. I guarantee you’ll have a magical time, where magical means you let the magic smoke out.

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Welcome to Booerns, a consumer-focused website that takes a new twist on customer justice. If you’ve got an Internet-calibre lawsuit brewing from your own mouth-breathing ineptitude, we’ll be there to call you out on it. If there’s a reasonable complaint about a large company screwing you over, we’ll conjecture that the executives are all inbred mules not worthy of consuming oxygen. That’s just how we roll.

I’m Jake, and I’ll likely be the angry, vitriolic poster at Booerns because I’m just so damned sick of people who feel they’re entitled to assistance without first searching Google. There are several other posters to this site and they’ll probably all have their own frothing rage to imbue your skulls with.

Here is a basic list of four things you should all shape up for and use common sense about:

• Identity theft: What would you do if your wallet was stolen? Certainly not mope about it while the mugger went to town on eBay. Have your credit report monitored and get your life back on track. It’s unfortunate to deal with, I agree, but I’m totally sick of hearing about this problem when there are many excellent resources out there, brought to you by Uncle Canuck.
• Credit cards: Don’t spend more than what you can reasonably expect to pay off. Look, I know that many people reading consumer sites are from the United States, where it seems to be common courtesy to pay exorbitant interest rates and bend over weekly for the bank. But if you read your credit card terms and conditions, and can hammy-hand a calculator, there’s no reason you should be that screwed.
• Packaging: Sometimes, things are packaged in large boxes for damage alleviation reasons. There’s nothing I’d hate more than getting shipped a computer case with the front drive bays smashed off, or a hard drive that’s experienced more than 350G’s of shock. Avoid aping your environmental conservation fetishes if the contents of the package in question are sensitive to damage, which in most cases they are.
• Getting screwed, in general: Do the research. Google is your friend. Know your rights and don’t overplay your hand. There are reasonable solutions for nearly every consumer issue reported. Small claims court counts as a viable option. Public shaming on a website doesn’t solve everything. Emailing executives and board members repeatedly will cause that avenue to fail miserably when it’s overused.

- Jake