Part VII: Purgatory

The elapsed time between posts would appear to imply that HP adequately met their responsibility to repair a faulty notebook. However, that would be greatly underestimating the depth of Hewlett Packard incompetence and their really quite remarkable ability to consistently under perform at seemingly the most basic of tasks.

Per Part VI, the motherboard and video card were repaired, and the notebook was returned to me on January 11th (again due to HP, an attempt was made to find the mysterious nonexistent 129 sixth floor, not 12964, much love to all the alert fedex drivers working the marina). Immediately upon powering on, the system behaved erratically and would consistently either lock up or reboot itself during ram intensive applications. At least the display now works. Also, as a compliment to the previous black screen of death, now I became accustomed to the blue screen of death. I'd wasted so much time just getting to this point, from india to the ceo, and to still have a non-functioning $2000 paper weight was disappointing to say the least.



Back on the phone with corporate case manager Graham, per his instructions should the laptop continue to fail, I explained to him the new symptoms - random shutdowns, system lock-up, and blue screen. I realize I'm really tired of talking to Graham, not that there's anything necessarily wrong with him, he seems alright, I'm just tired of repeating this stale process. Anyway, Graham is thinking memory problem, which is certainly a reasonable diagnosis. I had run memtest86 and gotten back a large number of errors which could suggest a ram or motherboard problem. But Windows Memory diagnostic tool found no errors and the ram was stable with no system compromises on another machine. Ineffectively, I tried to steer him away from this conclusion back to the possibility that maybe the repairs that HP had just done could be causing the new failure. He assured me the laptop would be thoroughly checked and repaired when I sent it in again, for the third time. With faith that the Hercule Poirot's at the HP Service Center could properly investigate the cause of these problems and that this time they could make good and maybe all would be forgiven. The laptop was sent to HP on January 30th and returned back to me on February 2nd, the repair slip simply stated - ram replaced.

Granted I am in no way an i.t. expert, but it seems reasonable to deduce that the problem is most likely not being caused by my ram module that has been consistently working since day one, but rather the new problem is probably related to the new motherboard that HP apparently clumsily replaced the week before. Again I power up the machine for the first time following a HP repair. Again the system freezes up before windows finishes booting up. I restart, the system manages to boot up, but this time I get a blue screen. A new blue screen, but still a blue screen nonetheless. This process of restarting, system freeze, restart, continues for a ridiculously long time. Each time hoping in vain that that is going to be the one time it works. At this point the computer is in a worse place that it was before I ever sent it to HP. Back when I only had the black screen of death I could still hook the thing up to an external monitor, but now, the thing won't work for more than five minutes.

Suspiciously, my corporate case manager has become harder to get on the phone. So, while I wait for Graham to call me back, I have some time to catch up on this ongoing report which stubbornly refuses to end.