Oh happy day

I have my laptop back! It only took 2 weeks. Turns out that the person I talked to on the telephone twice was either asking about a different laptop or misunderstood what the technicians were telling her. The lady who rang me today said that the reason my laptop took so long to repair was the fingerprint scanner, and it still doesn't work despite having been replaced with a new unit. You know what, it doesn't matter. Having the fingerprint thing was nice and convenient but I'd far rather just have my laptop at this point. So that's what I told her and she said I could come and pick it up.

Now I get the joy of turning it on and keeping my fingers crossed that the woman who told me they'd "swapped the drives out" wasn't right because if I've lost all my stuff I'm going to be more than a little cranky. Especially since it's Friday.

Just tell me the truth

I'm becoming convinced the computer repair shop is lying to me.

First - the background. On the 30th of October my oldest son spilt a glass of water next to my laptop, which pretty promptly stopped working. The next morning I rang HP to tell them my laptop wouldn't turn on and the tech support guy walked me through a few things to get the laptop going again. It did start up so I was all "yay!" and then I asked him if he could help with something else I'd been having trouble with, the fingerprint security thing that had stopped working a couple of weeks before. Whatever he asked me to do didn't work, and each step didn't work through several restarts of the computer until finally the computer just stopped working again. At this point he declared the job required more help then he could provide and told me it would need to go to a repairer. Since the repair shop is pretty near my house I decided to drop it off, so I have a receipt for the laptop dated 31 October at 12:04pm. I was told at this point that it would likely take a week because they were pretty backed up but they would order the parts that day so when it came up on their job list it would be pretty quick to fix.

Friday last week (so exactly one week later) at around 2pm I got a phone call from the repair shop asking me for my log-in password. The lady who rang me told me that they'd had to order a second part but they'd finished installing it so after a few tests they should be calling me back later that afternoon. Except they didn't. Yesterday (Tuesday) I was going to be in the area anyway so I popped in around 1pm to ask what the status of the job was, I was told that it was on the guy's desk and they would be probably returning it to me later in the afternoon. Except they didn't.

Today I just rang up to find out what was going on after starting to experience moderate panic about the whole looming-end-of-semester-with-all-relevant-information-saved-on-that-laptop business. Today the story is that the tech who was working on it yesterday was called away for an emergency, he wasn't there right now but one of the other techs believes that it should be ready by either this afternoon or tomorrow.

Now I don't know about anyone else, but this is starting to look a lot like I'm being fobbed off. Either they've lost it, they are incompetent, or I keep getting bumped down the priority queue. No matter what it is, I would far rather they told me the truth than keep getting my hopes up. Not to mention that this is a warranty repair and their stated service standard is 2-4 working days for warranty repairs. I almost hope HP send me out a customer satisfaction survey if I ever get the laptop back.

The jury is still out

Back when we first moved away from Sydney, my husband suggested I do "something" constructive with my time while we are living in Darwin for 2 years. He told me he didn't care much what I did as long as I wasn't bored and lonely while he was at sea. I kind of poked around a little and decided to enrol in some university studies externally, which is why this blog started, as a requirement of the first unit I was studying.

In order to keep both myself and my husband happy this meant that we needed another computer. We only had 3 ;) One of them is a very old laptop with about 40mb of internal memory, one of them is a fairly old desktop that won't run certain games that my husband likes to play (such as Star Wars: Empire at War), and one of them is the desktop that does play the games and was connected to the Internet. It sounds like a lot, but it's not enough - the old laptop crashed, the old desktop is used by three of the four children, and the other desktop didn't work as a time share arrangement. So we got a new laptop, one the kids aren't allowed to touch, has wireless internet (yay!) and can be used when we're travelling.

Which is a good thing, as it turns out. Two nights ago I turned the desktop computer off before I went to bed, wondering what was causing it to be so slow at opening up FireFox and if there was a virus or something I needed to scan for again. Yesterday morning I turned it on and found out what was wrong - BSOD! Apparently something went wrong with creating or saving a registry entry and now the computer needs to be fixed. Given that I am in the middle of a study period for uni that is delivered completely online and my husband is in the middle of a sea-going period that requires him to spend most of his time, funnily enough, at sea, the new laptop is a real life saver. If my desktop computer had crashed and we had no other computer capable of connecting to the internet I would have to withdraw from the uni unit which would be both a) bad for my study record and b) bad for the hip pocket as I think we've passed the census date for the study period so I wouldn't be able to withdraw without paying for the unit. It's also really lucky that part of the last unit taught me the value of Delicious so I have all my bookmarks.

So now I get to find out how good I really am at following instructions. I Googled the failure notice my BSOD gave me and found out what it is plus a way of fixing it. This fix is slightly risky in that I may lose all the data on that computer but hey, it probably needed a new install anyway. And at least I still have my laptop. The bad thing is that the current work I was doing for the study period was on the desktop which means I can't access it before it is due to be submitted on Monday, so I'm hoping to be granted the extension I requested.

And let that be a lesson to me - always keep your work on a second computer, online server or flash drive, just in case of Microsoft living up to it's reputation.