New Laptop

I finally heard back from the computer shop yesterday, after I dropped in my laptop there about 3 weeks or more ago. The news isn't really good. As I was suspecting, the graphics chip is shagged. Unfortunately, the gfx chip is soldered onto the motherboard, so I need a new motherboard. And that ain't cheap. Combined with parts & labour, it'll probably cost me about €600, maybe €700 to get it repaired. It seems that when it comes to HP & Compaq laptops, the build quality isn't exactly the best, they have a habit of subcontracting to parts manufacturers who may not be exactly overly concerned about quality control. They've had to do a few recalls of laptops in their 6xxx, 8xxx and 9xxx series (mine's a 9500 series, wasn't any recall on them), and in quite a few other cases, ppl have had laptops die on them just after the warranty expired, with similar problems to mine. Some have gotten HP to extend their warranty and so didn't have to pay for it, most didn't.

So, my options are not very appealing:

1) I get it fixed by the guy who has it now, which will take a few weeks, cost €6-700, and I'll have no real guarantees that the same problem won't happen again with the new card.
2) I get it back from him, send it off to HP, have them charge me €300 for just looking at it as it's out of warranty - and then probably have them charge me as much as the other guy for parts & labour.
3) I keep using my 7 year old Alienware laptop running OpenSolaris (so no games, videos) whose DVD drive works when it wants to, whose PCMCIA slot doesn't work so I can't use wireless (is the last-gen laptops before wireless came in as standard), which reboots spontaneously every now and then, whose battery life is about half an hour, and whose display flickers on and off if you have the screen tilted at the wrong angle.
4) I say "screw it" and go out and buy a new laptop with the money that I would have to spend on the repairs, and just use the old banjaxed laptop for parts (RAM, HD etc)

I reckon I'm definitely leaning towards option 4 at the mo. I know one thing for sure tho, if I do get a new laptop, it won't be a HP......

And I thought vodafone phone support were bad......

Well, I just rang up HP tech support to try to arrange to get my laptop fixed. Jesus christ! I tried to avoid doing this in the first place by trying to use their email support, but the only reply I got on that was "yeah, your laptop's pretty much screwed, contact our out of warranty people to arrange a pick-up" at which point I got directed to the UK cust care web page to get the number. So much for email....

So, in my misguided attempt to avoid talking to the UK, I go looking up the irish site. So, I ring the irish cust care number for out of warranty support (a 1550 number so I'm being charged 80c a min). First thing I hear is a voice with a British accent telling me I'm being charged 60p a minute for the call - so great, their Irish number automatically redirects to the UK anyway. Next thign I get a guy with an extremely thick accent which I can barely make out (and I'm normally good at working around accents), who after I explain that I need to get the laptop picked up for repair, forwards me to the tech support team. So, after about 4-5mins on hold, I get a guy with a Sitt Iffrikan accent (so is 50-50 whether I'm still onto the UK), to whom I have to explain things again. As soon as he hears that it's out of warranty, he says "ok, you have to talk to the special out of warranty team", and passes me over. This time I'm definitely talking to Mumbai. So, I explain the problem yet again, and then I get told that they have a standard rate for an out-of-warranty repair of £257.61 and I'll need to ring this other UK number to get a pick-up arranged!

So because I'm about 3-4 weeks out of warranty, I have to pay €301 (or just under 1/3 the price I paid for it in the first place) to get it fixed and talk to yet another 2-3 helldesk drones to arrange it! Think I'm going to try to find someone else who'll fix it......

Vodafone pt II: "All customers are equal......"

"...but some are more equal than others.

Well, I rang up Vodafone like I said I was going to do, to see could they do anything about the upgrade for me. Nope! According to the support guy I got (who was actually Irish, I was nearly shocked not to hear an Indian voice), the way they used to determine upgrades was how long you were a vodafone member, but back around December they moved to a new system which adds in a whole load more qualifications. Now, your eligibility is determined by stuff like how long you've been a member, whether you pay on time, whether you pay by direct debit or not, what price plan you're on and how much you spend on it. Am all good there apart from the last one - apparently since the new system went in, no-one who's been on the lower price plan (perfect fit 50) for less than 18 months has ever gotten an upgrade. Seems ppl on that plan don't spend enough according to Vodafone...... Guy even asked his supervisor could they push the upgrade through anyway, but the new automated system doesn't even allow them to do that

So, given my current account, I won't be able to get a new phone for at least another 6 months. So, I'd need to set up a new account. Asked the guy would I be able to do that and transfer over my existing number to use that. Apparently I can't, the only way to do that wud be to move my existing number to pre-pay, set up a new account to get the new phone, and keep the old number as a backup. Now I know that last year when I got this phone, I got the number transferred from my old account to a new account, and then back again - but then again it was a company phone so the new account was a business account, so vodafone probably bed over backwards for those guys.

So, according to Vodafone, the easiest way for me to get a new phone and keep my existing number is to move to O2! You'd think that these days that any company would want to keep their existing customers if they possibly can, especially given that the turnover in accounts with mobile phone companies is quite high. Apparently Vodafone tho don't think my business is important enough to them to allow exceptions, despite the fact that they've been getting my business since I left college. Well, is off to ebay etc for me for my new phone so, and if I can't get a good price there, Vodafone will not only be losing the potential €120 from my upgrade, they may be losing a customer too!

Vodafone: "your call is important to us - but not your loyalty"

Well, as if I needed it, another indication that once you sign up for something with one of the big companies, they don't care about you any more. I decided I wanted a new phone for my birthday, so I picked one out (Samsung S8300, the new 2Tocco Ultra") and went into the vodafone shop. Phone is €429 SIM-free but only €129 on Perfect fit 50, which is the price plan I'm on. So, I go up to the counter, say "I want XYZ phone", dude asks me if I'm already a vodafone customer and I say yes. So far so good. Next thing tho, I get told "sorry, you're not eligible for an upgrade". I ask how much the phone wud be if I wanted to get it, and he said €429, or the full whack. The only way to get it at the discount price is apparently to get a new account with a new number.

So, despite the fact I've been with vodafone for about 10 years, pay my bills by direct debit so I never miss a payment, and have my existing phone a year already (literally, was apparently a year yesterday, dude in the shop said), I'm not enough of a "good customer" to warrant getting an upgrade. Come to think about it, in the last 10 years I think I've only been eligible for an upgrade 2, maybe 3 times - most of the times I get my phones myself. Apparently a "good customer" is one who spends lots of money with them, and I keep my bill pretty low by using the 300 free web texts a month that I'm entitled to as a customer, and make most of my phone calls from work.

If however I was someone who wasn't on vodafone and decided I wanted to drink the kool-aid and be enfolded in their warm embrace, I'd get the phone at the cheaper price. Then again, even if I was like that, I still couldn't get the phone I really wanted: vodafone ireland, in their infinite wisdom, seem to have decided that the Sony Ericsson C905, which every other network in Ireland have had out since before Xmas, is still too new to offer to the their customers. So, instead, they're still trying to plug as their #1 high-end phone the Blackberry Storm, which no-one who has a choice in the matter actually wants, and those who have to have it (i.e. office types) don't like. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to change network: both my parents and my g/f are on vodafone and have free calls & texts to me, which they wouldn't have if I switched to say O2. so, I'm stuck with vodafone.

So, what do I do, suck it down, and pay the full price? Yeah, right, screw that. Ebay is an option, but the last time I did that with my Sony Ericsson w800i, I had no end of trouble when the phone went tits-up and I had to get it repaired. I could cancel my account and sign up as one of the new customers that vodafone seem to favour over me. Problem with that is I'll prob lose the number I've been using these last 10 years, and I don't want to go having to let everyone in my phone book know and then memorize a new number just for vodafone's convenience. So, will try ringing the customer support line tmro and hopefully if I get someone who can actually speak english, I'll try to see if I can get the upgrade, or at least switch accounts and keep my existing number. I'm not doing it tho because I love vodafone and can't imagine life without them, but because I'm not being given any other choice.

Pimp My Vista

Well, I have a new laptop - again. I finally got sick of every single game I tried saying "You need an Nvidia card to play me" and sticking two fingers up at me, so I'm selling my "old" (as in 5 months old) laptop to my flatmate and now I have myself a new HP Pavillion 9565ea. As well as an Nvidia card, it has a built-in webcam, TV tuner and fingerprint reader, so to login I don't even need to type a password any more. It also has 2 120GB HDs so plenty of space to put my pr0n movies, and something called a lightscribe writer on the DVD drive which means as well as burning blank DVDs, if you have a certain kind of DVD it can actually print the face of the DVD for you too!

Only problem is, as it's a new laptop, it's running Windows Vista. And Vista is, well, slow and clunky. Last time I got a laptop I tried sticking with Vista for a few weeks and then got sick of it and threw XP back on, but this time around it seems HP have gotten wise to that sort of thing and not put the XP drivers for things like the lightscribe, fingerprint reader and webcam on their support site. So, I may have to stick with Vista until I find all that good stuff!

I've already found a website called 99 Windows Vista Tips and Tweaks, so I can use as many of those as I can to pimp up Vista to see can you actually make a decently performing OS out of it! I'm already after managing to turn off that annoying "User Account Control " dialog that asks you "are you sure?" every time you try to do something, which is good. it's supposed to be to stop computer newbies from accidentally doing something stupid, but I reckon I know my way around a computer well enough now not to need it. I reckon as well that my old Alienware laptop doesn't really need as much RAM any more as no-one will be using it, so I might try to up the new one from 2GB to 4GB (altho I think Vista can't actually use any more than 3.2GB). So, let's see if we can't actually make use of this damn OS!

And, as well as that, I'm going to hunt for as many of the XP drivers for the laptop as I can find, just in case :-)

New Shiny Shiny

Well, I have meself a nice new phone here. Seems it's company policy that everyone has a company phone, so I took the opportunity to use the company discount to try out a Nokia for the first time in about 5-6 years. So, my new Nokia E51 has just landed on my desk. It looks nice anyway - about the same length and breadth as my K800i but about half as thick. I can't play with it til I get a full charge on it now, but I have a good 2 1/2hrs to play with it on my way home on the train this evening :-)

Vista doesn't like to go quietly on my laptop

Well, I finally got around to backing up all of the data on my laptop and decided to dump Vista off it and replace it with a more streamlined and less resource-hungry verion of windows (words I thought I'd never use about a Microsoft OS). It took me a while to find my working XP install disks (I have a few but they're either scratched or not bootable), but I finally found them, shoved one in the DVD drive and rebooted Vista for what I thought was the last time.

Not so.

The first disk I tried got as far as loading all the drivers and starting the windows installer, then it blue-screened on me. The second and third disks I got further, as far as the next screen after the other one blue-screened, but after I hit [ENTER] to install windows, another problem arose. Suddenly the installer is telling me that it can't find my HD. Great.

Loking on the web, I found the explanation here. Seems that newer laptops have some new intel technology for doing something i neither know about or care about. Luckily though, you can disable it in the BIOS, so I'm goign to try that now and see what results I get. Wish me luck! :-)

My New Toy

Well, I've been giving out about my old laptop now for a while, saying bits of it weren't working all that well (like the gfx card, the DVD drive, the wi-fi card, the heatsink, the 'e' key...) and that I was thinking of getting a replacement for it. I was passing though town during the week and saw that Dixons were doing a sale - 10% off all laptops, this weekend only. So, I decided to go in and take a look, and came out with a new toy. This is what I got:



The specs aren't hugely different to the Alienware - same RAM (1Gb), same GFX RAM (128Mb), slower chip (dual-core 1.7Ghz rather than a 2Ghz), bigger HD (100Gb), and what I couldn't get off any similar-specced Dell, an S-video out port so I could watch all the bootleg AVI movies I get off my boss on my wide-screen TV :-) One area where it is bigger tho is the screen - is a 17" rather than the 15.4" I had on the Alienware. One nice change as well is the machine not sounding like a hairdryer when I'm turning it on thanks to the dodgy heatsink causing the fan to be at 100% the whole time!

This is it sitting beside my work laptop:




My work laptop wants to be my new one when it grows up! :-P

One thing about it which is taking a bit of adjustment is that I'm now running Vista. Am not sure do I like it yet, still feels like a toy OS with all the flashy-flashy menu animations and stuff. I'm getting a bit annoyed as well with getting messages up saying "are you really sure you want to do this?" every time I try to install something - plus when I went to install my old version of Norton AV yesterday, I kept getting a dialog popping up that one of the devices Norton was installing was incompatible with Vista. Every time I clicked "OK" or close on it tho so that I could cancel Norton, the dialog would pop up again straight away! Took me nearly half an hour to cancel and roll back Norton in between clicking that fecking dialog! Hopefully there's an admin option there somewhere that I can turn that annoying shit off in!

Grr......

Well, looks like the filesystem on my laptop is screwed. I've been trying to download a few game demos the last few days, among them Command and Conquer 3 - a 1.18Gb download! Every single time I've downloaded the zip or rar files, I haven't been able to extract or install them. Every single one has either given me a CRC error on trying to extract or an error on the install file when I try to run it.

So, I've just been getting a lot of bad builds you might say. Well, I downloaded the exact same file (the C&C one) on my brand new (ish) work laptop, and had no problems with it. So, something is screwed on my lappy somewhere. I tried running the defragmenter but it made no difference.

This means my laptop is having the current set of problems:

• A messed-up filesystem


• A broken DVD drive - it'll read most CDs most of the time but only reads DVDs when it wants to. Oh yeah, plus the drive door broke off a good while ago


• A screwed up graphics card. It has to be the card rather than the drivers 'cos no matter what version of the drivers I put on I get the same result.


• The processor is also runnning a bit hot on it as well I reckon

So, it looks like this is a shop job. I could fix the first part by wiping and reinstalling (it won't be the first time - in fact, it's overdue), if only the bloody DVD drive would actually read the install CDs long enough to install! Time to start backing stuff up.....

Solaris "laptop friendly" release doesn't like Dell laptops

Now I know the pain of not "running Sun on Sun" (our old mantra in the office).....

Have a nice shiny laptop here, running windows but with a ton of free space on the drive. Decided over the weekend in a fit of madness to throw solaris on it, so I took one of the DVDs I burned before I left (S11 intel) and threw it on. For one thing it took forever to pick up the installer GUI (had to reboot maybe a dozen times before it picked it up), and then it wouldn’t recognize the network card, but I was sort of expecting that not to work. Then I went to reboot into windows, and discovered that I couldn’t login.

It seems that while the installer was smart enough to pick up that I had a windows partition and added it to the grub boot menu, it didn’t quite know what to do with the Dell system restore partition that you get with all dells these days. That partition is supposed to be marked as hidden, but now it wasn’t and so it came up on windows as C: and my C: drive went to E:. Problem with this was that the windows login was expecting to find the home dirs in C:\Documents and Settings not E:\Documents and Settings – so no-one could login, and the machine didn’t seem to be able to reset it to C. Took the admin here most of the morning to try to fix it (partition magic couldn’t even fix it) and in the end we took the nuclear option and just wiped it and re-installed the whole damn thing. So, all the crap I’ve set up on the lappy in the last week, and all the work stuff that was pre-installed for me, was hosed.

So, to list my problems:

• First prob was the installer kept freezing on "setting up java...." or some msg like that, no matter what install choice you picked - took maybe 20 or 30 reboots to get past it - and even then it still took maybe 10mins or longer to come up
  
• Second prob was the network card (Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx) wasn't picked up. 'ifconfig -a' gave me nothing, then I managed to use the GNOME network admin tool to get it picked up, but after that the machine wouldn't boot up as it kept timing out on some pci device (am assuming it was the network card as it worked before I config'ed it). Reinstalled again as I couldn’t get past it and the next time when I tried to run the network admin tool it froze and eventually crashed gnome - every time.
  
• The machine comes with an 80Mb partition for the Dell System Diagnostics at the start of the drive which is supposed to be hidden, but Solaris set it as unhidden. Straight away, windows picked it up as c:, the c: drive as e: and kept dying on login looking for c:\documents and settings. There seemed to be no way to reset this - even if we set the partition back as hidden windows couldn’t pick up the main partition as c:. This is probably more a windows problem than a solaris one, but solaris shouldn't have caused the prob in the first place.
  

And this was build 55b, the build that was supposed to be Solaris Developer Express, the “laptop-friendly” release!

Bloody windows update!

Well, I just found another reason to love windows update. I tried it out on my shiny new laptop this morning, running XP SP2, and it came up with 41 "critical" updates. So, I went and installed them and it asked me to reboot my computer, as normal. I'm used to this by now. I also discovered another annoying little feature -

After I rebooted tho, I was still getting the little yellow shield in my taskbar saying "there are updates available for your computer". So, I clicked on it and it came up with 13 updates to MS Office. I went back to the windows update webpage and got it to check again for updates, and it came back with nothing. You'd think that if you have an update mechanism that it would behave consistently! If one finds some patches, both of them should find them.

It gets even better then. After I installed the MS Office updates, I was asked to reboot my machine! For an office update! I don't mind rebooting after some security patch to a windows service or something like that, as it's a change to the OS, but for frickin' office? Does that mean that office is so tied into the system that it updates windows components as well? Hmm, wasn't there a court case about that sort of behaviour? ;-)