Saturday, August 16, 2008

Garage Door Openers & Calling India

Jim and Laurence are slaving away in the garage, installing a garage door opener. I, wisely, am remaining totally uninvolved in this process. I did, however, capture a brief record of the men at work.
While the AVI uploads, I'll tell you about my HP computer. In November of 2006 I bought a refurbed HP laptop in Oregon. Because it was a refurb I prudently bought a 3 year extended warranty. We've been noticing since March (which was when we replaced the battery, which HP charged me for twice, which was not covered by the extended warranty) that the PC has been hot. As in, too hot to use in your lap because it's really hot. So, after a big breakfast and a fully charged cell phone battery I called India. We rebooted, we downloaded firmware, we rebooted, we went to the bios screen and ran quick diags, and partial long diags, we rebooted, we vacuumed the back of the pc, we rebooted, we confirmed that there are no hairy pets in residence, we rebooted. We finally decided that the pc would have to be shipped for service. But wait, mum, there is a problem. The serial number on the bottom of the pc does not match the serial number on the bios screen. You used the serial number from the bottom of the pc, not the one from the bios screen. Soooooooooo? Well, that invalidates your warranty. So, I have to FAX to HP information they already have, such as my bios screen serial number, product number, order number for the extended warranty, phone number and everything else in the free world to ask them to please re-validate my warranty. What's wrong with this picture? They're a computer company, they know every single piece of data that I am being required to fax to them, but I must fax. They may or may not re-validate the warranty, but they most CERTAINLY will not refund the $214 I paid for said warranty. I am so pissed I can't see straight.




The screech you hear in the avi is me, being startled by the saw. Anyway, since we're hoping to be heading out next week, and there's no way the HP situation will be resolved by then, we went out and bought a Sony Vaio. I'm done with HP.
Hope you are all well, and your computers are well behaved.

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