#Darkomen Laptop

[msbarrows]

Laptop has arrived!!! According to tracking, it went on a truck in southern Ontario at 11:45pm last night.

Setting a 1 hour timer to give it time to warm to room temperature before I set it up and turn it on. Might also run a humidifier for a bit to lower any risk of static shock, because somehow managing to fry the motherboard sucked. (Also yes I've purchased an anti-static wrist strap since then.)

[msbarrows]

Bad News, But Also Good News

So I heard back from Geek Squad this morning. It's the motherboard in my gaming laptop which needs replacing. Since I bought this one directly from HP Canada, not Best Buy, it's not a model they have access to get the part for, so they've shipped it back unrepaired.

BUT - the good news. Someone, I assume while they were checking to see if I was owed any rebate of the repair fee I pre-paid, double-checked its warranty status. Turns out I still have 25 days left on it's 3 Year Care Pack coverage, which I hadn't seen when checking the HP site myself, because it's on a detail page I didn't access - the summary I did see on my HP dash just says "details unavailable", which I thought meant there was no coverage. I bought it three years ago, I figured it had been 1 to 2 year coverage.

So the Geek Squad guy read me off the serial number for my laptop (since it's currently in transit from southern Ontario) and told me to contact HP directly for service. After a half hour or so spent with someone on chat^ they agreed that yup, sounds like it's probably a hardware issue, and are shipping me a shipping box to ship it in for service.

So it's going to take a while longer, but the laptop should eventually be fixed.

Also, since it was actually still under warranty? Best Buy is fully refunding the repair fee. Thank you, Geek Squad guy!

^ either a bot or someone with a script they had to rigidly follow despite whatever the customer told them - hello, the Geek Squad diagnostician says the motherboard is fried, I don't think holding down the power button for 15 seconds is going to cut it, but sure, yes, that was something I actually did do before sending it out for repair.

[msbarrows]

Well, my gaming laptop is now in the hands of the Geek Squad. Brother drove me in to town once he got off work today, and I dropped it off at the desk at the Best Buy in town. They apparently don't do that particular level and/or kind of repair locally, so the laptop will be shipped down to their big repair centre in Toronto tomorrow, and at some point I'll be contacted by a technician to let me know what its fixable/nonfixable status is, and if there'll be any charges beyond the mid-range coverage repair fee I just paid.

I figure most optimistically it'll be about a week until I see it again, given transit there and back and at least a few days in between to allow for work to be done on it. Possibly longer, if it needs replacement parts they don't have on hand. Hopefully it is not deader than an African grey parrot pining for the fjords :\

Guess I might as well get gmail set up on this old clunker of a laptop, so I can at least keep on top of my daily dragons in Flight Rising. Thankfully I have a fairly recent backup of the contents of my gdrive, so I won't have to let it work it's way through re-downloading everything to the local drive.

[msbarrows]

I feel a sudden, urgent need to rant, probably because I just spent a ridiculous amount of time on simply confirming that, yes, the local Best Buy's Geek Squad is an authorized service centre for HP, and all I need to do is walk in and drop off my laptop. Like, the HP web site helped me locate any service centres near me (though it kept being convinced I was in southern Ontario, not up around Sudbury). The Best Buy web site confirmed there's a Geek Squad centre there. Their "Chat with an agent" link is a dirty filthy lie, however, as when you phone the number provided, you end up on an automated voice mail system that at no point actually gives you an option to speak to a human, and instead eventually hangs up on you after (unhelpfully) offering to text or email you links of where to go to get service via their web site.

I eventually resorted to trying the live tech support chat option, where the agent (also potentially just a bot responding to keywords) admitted that, yes, they do tech support, it's strictly walk-in no appointment needed, and that, oh yeah, personnel in-store can't be reached by phone.

JFC Best Buy at least have your damn web site or voice mail tree have information like that AVAILABLE RIGHT THERE. That was all I needed to know. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops for a quarter of an hour or more just to confirm that yeah, you do HP support, and yeah, I can just bring in and drop off my laptop.

...now I just need to get said laptop there. Brother has offered that if they're open late enough, he can drive it in after work, weather permitting. Also, if there was a non-Best Buy option, they would so be getting my business instead.

[msbarrows]

Well, made it back home safely, racing the storm all the way north. Unpacked clothing etc., took a break, set up computer... laptop won't power on.

Checked support forums, tried their recommendation (open case, remove battery, hold down power button for 15 seconds, reinstall battery, plug in, let charge for a bit, attempt powering on again) - no luck. ARGH!!!

There is an authorized service centre in the nearest actual city (at a Best Buy, go figure) but until I can get it there and (hopefully) repaired, I am reduced to using my elderly previous laptop, that I've only kept around for playing movies on, pretty much, so it only has like firefox and VLC installed. And of course my brother is about to start a run of day shifts, so I'll probably have to look into getting it couriered in to town to get it fixed, or wait 5-6 days just to get it to them, much less serviced

Man I am having so much bad luck with computer equipment this last couple weeks. At least my keyboard survived; I'll just have to hope the laptop is also revivable.

In the meantime I suppose I should at least hook up the crappy old laptop to the better monitor-keyboard-mouse so I can at least use it more comfortably. And maybe try another round of battery pulling on my good laptop later in the hope it'll magically fix itself.

[msbarrows]

Well that was fast - got a notification that my laptop had reached the HP repair centre this morning, got a second notification that it had been repaired and was being shipped back as I was making supper in late afternoon. According to tracking they've only generated the label so far, so it's extremely unlikely to show up tomorrow, but as it's being sent by second day shipping it is very likely to show up on Thursday. YAY!!!

Have to wait and see how much has been screwed up by the motherboard replacement, mostly. Like did they just transfer all my existing drives over as is, or did they also do a factory reset and/or a complete OS reinstall. Basically whether or not I'll need to be reinstalling all my software. Certainly hoping that whatever they did, the OS is properly registered to MS for the hardware change. Like, I'd want to assume that if they did anything that impacted the OS that they'd make sure it was properly registered again afterwards, but the paranoia is strong.

(The joy of OS's that lock themselves to a particular hardware setup, and woe betide you if you make a change that it decides means it's no longer on the authorized machine... such as replacing the motherboard.)

[msbarrows]

Laptop is off for servicing (again)!

Shipping box for it arrived by UPS yesterday afternoon, so today my brother drove me into town to pick up the (unrepaired) laptop from Geek Squad. Threw it in the box with the (completed) paperwork, bunged the prepaid shipping label and battery warning sticker on it, taped it up, took it to a UPS drop-off location.

If I have good luck with shipping times, and depending on how long it takes HP to do a motherboard replacement, I might see it back as soon as about a week from now, though I'm expecting that it'll be more likely to be in the 1-2 week range.

And then, since replacing the motherboard also means they'll be reinstalling windows, I'll probably be having to reinstall all my software too to get the requisite registry entries in place. But as long as I have my gaming rig back, I don't care.