Unplugged

She earned her Nemesis nickname an hour after I took her out of the box.

Two weeks of blue screens, fatal errors, massive crashes, programs spontaneously deleting and uninstalling on boot. 16 hours on the phone with tech support. 4 complete fdisk reformats. No resolution.

I got pissed. I started digging. I solved the problem, not them. They shipped the damn machine out of the warehouse with a bad RAM chip. They replace, things improve.

Christmas Eve. Won't start. Dead. Nothing. Will not boot. Go through the hard boot, removing cords, battery, etc. Power gets TO the unit, but the unit won't use it to boot. Great. More phone time.

Send a box. Send the laptop in. Get it back, with a note that says it worked for them, oh well. They did .... NOTHING to it. Nothing.

Three hours later, it died again. Same problem, power to it, nothing happens. More phone time. Get a new box. Send it back in new box. This time, told that the heat spreader was dusty and they switched it out. Uh huh. They send it back.

Three days later, it's dead as a frickin doornail, RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of a paid contract piece. Yes, it's ON at the time, and I lose everything because it died in the middle of CTRL-S.

Why, yes, it's phone call time again. I'm on hold 14 minutes while they try to get me a supervisior. By this time .... So I go through the whole sordid story, throwing names and dates and error messages and case numbers at the woman.

"Faces of Death" had nothing on this conversation. PookaMouse ROARED.

The solution?

Hurry up and wait. I SHOULD "get a phonecall" from a Quality Manager in 7-10 DAYS. Apparently only someone with a spiffy title is allowed to make any real decisions.

This is my second Compaq. It will be the last.

The first one I fell in love with. All of the problems I had with her resulted from physical damage (note to self: you still need to make that cat fur bikini for the kids). Despite bad things I'd heard about them, I had a wonderful experience.

So I bought another one to replace it when she finally died.

I'm waiting once again to hear Frisco tell me, "Shoulda bought a Mac."