I think I am finally back online. As I was indicating my laptop was dying on me and it finally did. Unfortunately I was in Chicago when it happened.
After I got in on Easter Sunday I started the process of recovering my data. I got lucky because at this point Windows would no longer boot and gave me a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) indicating that it couldn't mount any partitions. In computer-speak, this is usually very bad. But I got my data onto my portable HDD and then wiped out the HDD and started re-loading Windows XP.
It was fairly obviously that the drive was fooked because the load was taking far longer than necessary and when I tried installing the 8-billion patches to XP I started getting read/write failures on the drive. At this point I realized it really was hardware related and not just Windows messing up.
I called HP to order a new drive. They wanted $450 for a new 60GB (giga-byte) drive!!! I was fairly astounded and explained to the guy that was about 1/2 the price of a new laptop! He then tells me he is "authorized" to sell me a new laptop for just $400 more with Vista.....and I cut him off and told him he was smoking crack. "Joe" really wasn't sure how to handle me at this point. I then said I was going to source the drive somewhere else at which point he tried to tell me that it wouldn't work right and blah blah...CLICK! Oh, I'm sorry? Were you saying something?
I ran down to Fry's and picked up a new 100GB, 5400 RPM drive for a whopping $99+ tax. They had a 120GB for just $5 more, but they were out of stock. The kicker is that it is a Toshiba drive, just like my old one. So far, it's working great and I have all my data intact (MAKE BACKUPS!). It just took a looooooong time to get it all back together. I still have little things I am tweaking here and there, but for the most part I am good to go.
And as for HP? I wrote them a letter, but I doubt I'll hear anything back.
1 comment:
IMHO, You'll never hear anything from HP. They have some serious ethical issues going on in their managment and marketing leadership right now. Most likely, they'll just try to get your machine's serial number and do whatever they can to blacklist it. Any company that will stoop to their behavior cannot be trusted. Hear that Wal-Mart?
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