New laptop: HP from Costco
News ·Sunday June 6, 2010 @ 16:19 EDT (link)
My old Acer laptop gave up the ghost recently; it was quite sudden; it had exhibited some hard drive slowdowns and occasional boot trouble, but then a few weeks ago it either failed to boot up entirely or required a lot of power-up attempts to start, and then froze up completely a few minutes in. I suspected a heat issue, as did the technician at Hard Drives Northwest where I took it for service, although he also suspected that it was just the motherboard wearing out. He managed to back up the drive, which was going bad, to another IDE drive in a USB enclosure.
I brought the laptop in for service on May 5th; they had it for several weeks; I picked it up on May 28th, a couple days after the technician gave up on getting it to stay booted. Much of the time was spent copying the drive to another one (also an IDE, since the first plan was to put it back in the hopes that the disk was the only problem). Total cost for the repairs and new drive (old drive was 100G, new 120G, the closest they had) was $156.56, not bad given the diagnostic work done and new drive too. I just attached the USB enclosure to a machine today and everything is accessible (even the Linux ext3 partition). The most important data I think was a OneNote notebook, which is unfortunately in the binary format difficult to view from Linux. I'm not sure if any open tools can open it and (due to sharing, range-locking, etc.) they don't have an XML format. I will attempt to convert it (via export, or possibly writing a convert myself in Python or Perl using the public MS-ONE OneNote file format specification).
The old Acer was a TravelMate 4504LMi (Intel Pentium M, 1.8GHz, 100G HD, DVD±RW, 1G RAM, 802.11b/g). I checked the database—I was wondering how much I paid for it—and I'd forgotten to enter it, but I found the original receipt (turns out I bought it at Hard Drives Northwest). (When I was looking at laptops at HDNW after picking it up, I noticed that a good many were slower than my Acer; improvements now are more in the multicore or low-power areas.) I bought it on May 14, 2005, so it lasted almost 5 years, which isn't a bad run for a laptop, around when we were getting our Washington drivers' licenses, so not long after we moved here.
The price I'm paying for laptops, probably of equivalent quality at time of purchase, is trending down: my Sony Vaio was $2381.45 (June 2002, Circuit City, Memphis, TN), the Acer was $1630.91 (May 2005, HDNW, Bellevue, WA), and the new HP was just under $1000 (Costco, Woodinville, WA).
I haven't unpacked the HP from Costco yet, but I liked the store demo model because it was reasonable small, among the lightest on display, and I'd been told by users that HP was a reliable brand (although I'm sure each line has good and bad models). I bought it from Costco because they have a 90-day no questions asked return policy. I'll bet that it gets abused by some (device "rental", returning items they damaged—they've even accepted returns of half-eaten food I hear), but it's also such peace of mind that it probably drives a good number of people to buy there and cancels out the cost of abuse. Since I'll be taking the laptop on our trip cross-country, where it will get more use than in the few weeks before, I might not find problems with it until then; so HDNW's 30-day return policy would be insufficient. Furthermore, Costco has stores all across the country and they probably allow returns at any of them.
A report on using the laptop will surely follow (assume no news is good news).
Books finished: Winter's Heart.
