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My wife and I are newlyweds, and would be described as your average techno-yuppies. I'm 24, she is 22. We have been married for almost 6 months, lived together for almost a year now, and before we were married, we dated for the good part of 7 years. We have spent many a Christmas together, but this year was special, this was the first Christmas as a married couple, the first year we were a unit outside our families, the first year we felt like adults.
She is a budding new esthetician at a Salon here in town, and I just got a pretty important promotion at work, so we were going to be having some money coming in. Things are going right for once in our lives, and we are finally getting ahead.
So, for Christmas this year, we both decided that we should get a joint gift for each other, something we had both been dreaming of getting for a while now. We wanted a laptop.
Now, being the computer geeks we are, we both wanted to get something high end, and HP was giving us a pretty decent line of credit for the laptop, my father in law works as an engineer for HP, and hell, I even worked on their thermal inkjet line for 3 years right out of high school. The choice was of course, HP.
So, we went online, and configured the laptop we wanted. We ended up with a 1.6 ghz Core Duo 2 with a gig of RAM and a GeForce Go 7600 with 512mb of video memory.
We were both very, very excited that it was coming, and HP had promised for it to be here on the 23rd, so we could have it all weekend to play with. My wife and I had lined out all the software we were going to install, all the games, and dreamt of playing WoW on a laptop. She would be able to bring it to work and use it between clients, and I could bring it to work at night and work on homework in my lab during my down time.
After checking the tracking number every hour to see where our laptop was, it amazingly made it from Shanghai to Anchorage to Indianapolis to Portland and finally to Corvallis in just about 48 hours. Looking at the FedEx tracking report, and due to time zones, it seemed the laptop was traveling time on its way to our home. Maybe this time travel and the speed associated with going back in time is what caused our laptop's early demise.
This morning, I checked the tracking number right before I went to bed, and it was on the truck ready for delivery. It was being delivered to our inlaws house, and no one was home to pick it up, so my wife drove out to FedEx to pick it up.
She shows up at home and yells from the door "IT IS HERE!", as I jump from bed to meet her. We both open it up, giggling giddily awaiting our new toy.
The first thing that seems weird is that the sticker on it says "Intel Centrino Duo" on it. Weird. The windows authentication sticker on the bottom was ripped up a little bit. Strange. Everything else looks prestine and in the right order.
So, we plug it in and press the power. The blue power lights come on, the CD whirls up for half a second.
Then nothing.
The lights stay on, no noise, no screen, no POST data, nothing. I try everything I could think of at the time. I check the RAM, switch the sticks, leave only one in. Nothing.
After being on hold for over an hour, I finally get through to tech support, and by tech support I mean an Indian guy who knows much less than I do about computers, and even less english, and is obviously reading from a script.
"Now take out the battery. See the 2 screws under it? Take them out and remove the 2 green chips." He was trying to get me to do what I had already done, check the RAM, but was giving me horribly wrong instructions. After talking to him for an hour, getting even more frustrated, I end up hanging up mid sentance, knowing there is no chance for this thing if I continue to listen to this guy.
Finally, extremely pissed knowing that our Christmas present is pretty much DoA, I call Customer Service and luckily get someone from North America, and tell him the problem and how pissed I was. He was nice enough to give us a $70 credit to our account, but we have to ship our lappy back to HP so they can give us a credit to our account and we can purchase a new laptop. What a pain, considering FedEx is a good 15 miles away.
So, in short, our join Christmas present of a HP dv9000t laptop turns its lights on when you press the power button and is bricked beyond that for all I can tell. Great.
I'm just hoping that when we order a new one, we can get the same one for the same price under the same specials, which are now over. If not, we are going to have to settle for a cheaper laptop, let alone get our Christmas present many weeks later.
So far, our first Christmas as a married couple is starting to suck, unless any of you know how I could possibly un-brick this thing before I send it back off this morning...
She is a budding new esthetician at a Salon here in town, and I just got a pretty important promotion at work, so we were going to be having some money coming in. Things are going right for once in our lives, and we are finally getting ahead.
So, for Christmas this year, we both decided that we should get a joint gift for each other, something we had both been dreaming of getting for a while now. We wanted a laptop.
Now, being the computer geeks we are, we both wanted to get something high end, and HP was giving us a pretty decent line of credit for the laptop, my father in law works as an engineer for HP, and hell, I even worked on their thermal inkjet line for 3 years right out of high school. The choice was of course, HP.
So, we went online, and configured the laptop we wanted. We ended up with a 1.6 ghz Core Duo 2 with a gig of RAM and a GeForce Go 7600 with 512mb of video memory.
We were both very, very excited that it was coming, and HP had promised for it to be here on the 23rd, so we could have it all weekend to play with. My wife and I had lined out all the software we were going to install, all the games, and dreamt of playing WoW on a laptop. She would be able to bring it to work and use it between clients, and I could bring it to work at night and work on homework in my lab during my down time.
After checking the tracking number every hour to see where our laptop was, it amazingly made it from Shanghai to Anchorage to Indianapolis to Portland and finally to Corvallis in just about 48 hours. Looking at the FedEx tracking report, and due to time zones, it seemed the laptop was traveling time on its way to our home. Maybe this time travel and the speed associated with going back in time is what caused our laptop's early demise.
This morning, I checked the tracking number right before I went to bed, and it was on the truck ready for delivery. It was being delivered to our inlaws house, and no one was home to pick it up, so my wife drove out to FedEx to pick it up.
She shows up at home and yells from the door "IT IS HERE!", as I jump from bed to meet her. We both open it up, giggling giddily awaiting our new toy.
The first thing that seems weird is that the sticker on it says "Intel Centrino Duo" on it. Weird. The windows authentication sticker on the bottom was ripped up a little bit. Strange. Everything else looks prestine and in the right order.
So, we plug it in and press the power. The blue power lights come on, the CD whirls up for half a second.
Then nothing.
The lights stay on, no noise, no screen, no POST data, nothing. I try everything I could think of at the time. I check the RAM, switch the sticks, leave only one in. Nothing.
After being on hold for over an hour, I finally get through to tech support, and by tech support I mean an Indian guy who knows much less than I do about computers, and even less english, and is obviously reading from a script.
"Now take out the battery. See the 2 screws under it? Take them out and remove the 2 green chips." He was trying to get me to do what I had already done, check the RAM, but was giving me horribly wrong instructions. After talking to him for an hour, getting even more frustrated, I end up hanging up mid sentance, knowing there is no chance for this thing if I continue to listen to this guy.
Finally, extremely pissed knowing that our Christmas present is pretty much DoA, I call Customer Service and luckily get someone from North America, and tell him the problem and how pissed I was. He was nice enough to give us a $70 credit to our account, but we have to ship our lappy back to HP so they can give us a credit to our account and we can purchase a new laptop. What a pain, considering FedEx is a good 15 miles away.
So, in short, our join Christmas present of a HP dv9000t laptop turns its lights on when you press the power button and is bricked beyond that for all I can tell. Great.
I'm just hoping that when we order a new one, we can get the same one for the same price under the same specials, which are now over. If not, we are going to have to settle for a cheaper laptop, let alone get our Christmas present many weeks later.
So far, our first Christmas as a married couple is starting to suck, unless any of you know how I could possibly un-brick this thing before I send it back off this morning...
