... she was wrestling with her laptop. Sadly, the saga continues: After dealing with helpdesks in India and the US, I coerced HP to do a 'pickup' service for my laptop and deal with the issue directly instead of another nightmare dealing with an 'authorized repair center' holding it for a month and doing nothing. We had to pay for this service, as my laptop's no longer under warranty (even if the problem started only a few months after I got the laptop -- is there a "Lemon Law" for technology?) but they still promised a 7-working-day turnaround. Fine with me. I received my laptop back the day after my birthday, with a letter from HP telling me what was done -- in this case, the stated complaint was "noisy hard drive" and the solution was "replaced hard drive".

Now, considering that my actual stated complaint wasn't "noisy hard drive" but "System locks up itermittantly, repeatedly, and especially when laptop is physically moved around", I was a little surprised/miffed to see none of my actual complaint listed. Maybe something loose in the hard drive was the culprit all the time? I spent a very careful few weeks testing my laptop for stability before even thinking about downloading all my data back onto it. I'm glad I did that. The only things I installed were the usual windows updates, Norton Systemworks Pro (so I could have my Ghost images), and MUSH client. After it started locking up again, I pulled up the Ghost Image I had made of it, and ran it without any windows updates.... and it still crashed. More importantly, whenever I shifted it in my lap (as I am wont to do), it would freeze up. This was definitely a hardware issue, and I was definitely upset.

So, I spent another 2 hours this week wrestling back and forth with helpstaff and tech-support on two continents until I got ahold of someone who actually listened to what I was saying, comprehended what I was saying, and understood the tone in my voice was an incipient case of "going postal" about the whole thing. Because I called within the replaced hard-drive's warranty, they sent me another shiipping box to mail my laptop back to HP -- but this time, no charge. And the tech sounded honestly concerned that the issue was completely ignored the last time HP had it, so he made a note in his system to actually check hardware issues relating to system hanging problems (I'm voting on a bad connector currently) instead of just slapping another component in and saying it works.

Which means that I'm once again sans laptop (which was my primary means of online interraction, via mucks, There, LJ, AIM and so forth), and my current work schedule leaves me little time or desire to trudge up the two flights of stairs to muck from my desktop machine, so I'm kinda quiet on the datawaves for the moment.

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: Soundtrack to "Kill Bill vol. 1"