O.K. so I have been off line for a while. Not totally a bad thing but not a great thing either.
The computer finally gave up on me. What a pain. First one side of my dual core processor locks up making everything run very slowly. This lasted about a week. It was at this point that I contacted the American Express warranty people. Since I bought the computer at Costco and used my Costco American Express card they extended the warranty by one year. I am kinda glad I did.
I have had issues with this HP Pavilion box on and off since day one and it finally got so bad that it became unusable. I was never sure what the cause was as the problems acted differently each time. Of course the first thought is that you have picked up a virus or some nasty software but that is the first thing I checked for and except for a few spy-ware cookies I was clean. (Practice good surfing habits people.)
In the past I have contacted Costco’s concierge service which comes with new electronic purchases. They act as an intermediary for user issues and are very friendly, patient and helpful. If they are unable to solve directly (I am guessing the 80/20 rule were 80% of all new customer problems can be handled with the same 20% of the questions/answers) they will contact the manufacturer on your behalf. The first contact was to help me create the initial back up disc for the operating system that no one seems to ship with new computers anymore. The machine would not cooperate in making the disc for me so HP agreed to send me the backup Disc directly. Problem solved, back to work.
The next time was when the Hardware and/or Memory started going flaky. I never could tell which if either was really bad but during the experience I got a lot more familiar with some of the system diagnostic tools. With the support of the concierge I ran many different diagnostics but without a clear, consistent indication of what was wrong we couldn’t proceed to fix anything. This is also the time when I began to suspect that all the different Microsoft updates might have had something to do with it. It seemed like every time I turned around there was a new critical update that needed to be loaded, and when I did load them sometimes things got better and sometimes things got worse, sometimes much worse. It was in this phase that I learned about Vistas ability to return itself to a previous version. That came in handy a couple of times but again I never really was able to identify what the real problem was or what really fixed it.
And here is the rub. The computer would go on these ‘rants’ if you will for several weeks marked by excessive CPU time, or constant hard drive activity even when the computer should be in sleep mode, or the most irritating action of all, the reboot out of nowhere. I have heard that you should leave your computer on all the time and I have heard that you should leave your computer off when not in use. I have gone both ways and at this stage I don’t think it really matters either way. Based on the way you use your computer and frequency it becomes more a matter of convenience versus energy savings from my point of view.
Either way, the computer over its life has acted up on several occasions, diagnostics would turn up one problem or another without consistency, and then after a few aggravating days and sometimes weeks the computer would right itself and all would be well again. It would run perfectly normal for weeks and months with no rhyme or reason.
Unexpected reboots are generally not a good sign and that was always a good signal to me that something was acting up again with mine. Sometimes it was in the middle of the night and the next day when you went to use it you would notice that it had done a reboot. Sometimes I think this was legitimate as a new Microsoft update had been pushed out and it require a restart. It would take a little digging to see if that was the cause but it didn’t explain all of the non-use reboots, not by half.
It is when it started rebooting in the middle of what you were doing that really gave cause for alarm, and much frustration. There is the case where you get something hung up and you have to do a hard reboot yourself, it is a pain but that is a fact of life with these computers running Microsoft. It is something else entirely when it happens on its own or is accompanied by the blue screen of death. This last episode got so bad that I could no longer use it for any amount of time without it crashing in the middle of whatever I was doing. Bad news for me…and bad news for my data.
I finally gave up trying to figure it out and contacted American Express Warranty service, described the problem with what my attempted corrections had been and they agreed to send it in for repairs. Now I face my second problem, the service repair shop they use is a local PC store that has a store about 10 miles from home; however, the store they use for warranty work is located about 70 miles from my home. No problem, I could just run it down there myself and have them fix it while I wait and I would be back in the chase. I neglected to think about the fact that I would have to drop it off and leave it with them for who knows how long before they could get to it, diagnose it, repair it, and return it. On second thought, send me the shipping instructions.
Ah yes, the shipping instructions. They were sent fairly quickly…to my e-mail account…that is accessed through the internet…by… (I think you got ahead of me on this one)…my broken computer. O.K. the internet is everywhere and so that wasn’t as big a problem as it might have been but still one I had to work through. The next problem was slightly bigger.
The instructions said to take the shipping slip to the local UPS store, they would box it and ship it for you, all you needed to bring was the box, power cord, back up operating system software, and the signed authorization letter for the local PC store to do the work. On this signed letter was a place to enter your description of the problem and a paragraph warning of the chance that through the repair of the computer it may be necessary to do a rebuild of the system, in other words wipe out everything on the computer and start all over with a fresh load of the operating system and this my friends means that any files and photos you had loaded on your computer that didn’t reside in another spot would be lost forever.
Now you would think that someone that has had this much problem with their computer would know enough to have backed everything up (and at this point probably several times a day) and you would be right…except for the several times a day. I couldn’t remember when the last time I had done a back up so I wasn’t sure where to begin and I knew I had a lot of photos…a lot of photos which means a lot of backup space was required. That shouldn’t be a problem as I had plenty of CDs and DVDs with which to do this but it would be a lot more convenient to get one of those new portable backup drives, plug it in and let it do it all in one big sweep. Now which one do I get, how big should it be and how much should it cost? Back to Costco.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West. Click here for Part Two of the HP adventures.
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