Shabbir’s Blog

Hi All,

Apologies for not having posted for a few days, this was entirely out of my hands, and you can firmly blame HP for it.  Allow me to explain:

 I have an HP Pavilion DV8000 Series laptop that I had purchased less than a year ago from PC World, suddenly last week - while I was actually in the middle of some seriously important coding - my laptop’s fan decided to fall over and cease performing it’s essential function.

So what did this do?  Well initially nothing, but as the machine went through some serious paces, it started to get hotter and hotter, and ultimately as a safety mechanism, it shut itself off. 

Right so when something like this happens, what do you do?  You let the laptop cool down, then you try again, so that’s what I did - it lasted all of 5 minutes!! 

So anyway, here I am laptop with critical data, unable to keep it powered up for longer than 5 min’s, I’m in a panic.  What does one do??  I checked with my better half, and it was under warranty, so we rushed over to PC World, and asked if they could repair the fan. 

Nope they said, they would have to take it in and send it off, and in fact I’d have to remove Vista from my laptop and reset it to it’s default factory configuration (using the recovery DVDs) to Windows XP.

I explained to the fellow in the store, I’ve got data on there, if I rebuild the machine (if it stays on long enough to be rebuilt that is) - I’d lose my data, and that’d render the entire exercise futile.

But he was totally confused at this point, and decided to dig his heals in and say, nope, you have to re-install Windows XP from the recovery CD, I even explained to him that I had a legitimate copy of Windows Vista Ultimate, with a real CD-KEY, that activated and updates fine no problem, can they just fix the fan, as that is the problem, it’s got nothing to do with the HDD or the memory or anything, just a basic mechanical fan failure.

But sadly, he was insistent, gave me a number of some division in PC World named “The Tech Guys” - and said I should re-installed from the recovery DVDs and then call them, they’d take me through some “diagnostics”, and then if required, they come and collect it for repair - as it was still under warranty.

I was dejected.  It wasn’t so much that I didn’t have my laptop, it was that fact that I had data on there that was soooo close to completion - I suppose it could be argued that it’s my fault for not having it on one of my many removable HDD’s - but you know how it is - sometimes you’re working on a piece of software, or a document or something, and it just gets saved where it gets saved - and when it’s completed it gets moved into source control, and removal media, etc, etc.

Anyway’s, I was stuck.  I then had to get an enclosure for the HP’s Laptop SATA drives, physically extract them from the machine, put them in the enclosure, and then salvage the data - which thankfully I managed to do.

Now that laptop is going away for repairs, without the Windows XP default install, and without the Windows Vista install, but with two totally empty and formatted hard drives, simply because the beast won’t stay powered up for long enough to do anything of value!!  All because of a blown out fan.

Now this leads me onto a very interesting thought.  This laptop is now the fifth (yeah that’s right 5th) laptop that I’ve heard of that just before its warranty finishes has a problem with something or another related to cooling or fans.  My sister-in-law’s laptop had the same problem, my nieces had the same problem, my nephew had the same problem, a friend of mine had the same problem, and to round it all off nicely, I have the same problem - and in fact my friend had the same problem on a batch of laptops - I think it was five (5) or something like that - all having an identical problem.  An example of folks having this problem can be found at Skywire - Alex Judd’s Blog.  Enjoy!

I think HP need to get their production line sorted, or is this some sort of evil ploy by the corporate rulers to get us suckers to buy a new laptop every year without fail?  Is it Bill Gate’s fault because he want’s new laptops and desktops purchased so that Vista has more sales? Who knows and more importantly what can we do about it?  With laptops you’re kinda stuck, but some brands are better than others;

I’ve had an old Sony Vaio X18 (see the picture to the left), and this has been with me since 1999, and is a sturdy work horse, sure it’s battery is dead now, and doesn’t hold even a second of charge, but it functions perfectly fine, now running Linux and monitoring some of the systems that I have to keep an eye on.  It doesn’t complain, it doens’t run slowly, it just does what it says on the box - works.  Everything about it is still pretty pristine.

I know from friends who have Sony machines, how reliable they are, Dell machines, also very reliable and generally without problems, so why HP?  I remember when Compaq took out DEC, and something went out of the DEC machines, the Digital Unix product - probably the best 64bit Linux and the company as a whole.  Then in May 2002 Compaq which had hardly completed it’s integration of Digital Equipment Corporation was taken out or to quote the corporate speak “merged with” Hewlett Packard, and everything went horribly wrong.

I mean Compaq made some pretty reasonable kit, their Deskpros and their server products were not something to be joked about, but sadly, things started to change, and something again went out of the company.

Prior to that I’d not heard of people having major problems with HP, but now, it seems that this is part for the course.  Sad but true - unless someone can prove me otherwise.

Anyway, the other reason I haven’t really been posting for the last week or so is that both my wife and myself were also tied up with family commitments and my niece’s wedding (see page 2 of the PDF) - congratulations to Zishan and Sayyeda on their marriage, and may you have an eternity of love and joy together - which ultimately left us tired and drained, and it’s only now that I feel I have recovered enough to start posting again, so here we are!

Anyways, things are looking positive again, I have a machine, I have some time to work on the blog, not much but enough to post an article or two every day, so onwards and upwards.

Warm Regards,

Shabbir