Two weeks ago, while I was in California on business, my laptop died. I spent two hours on the phone with HP trying to figure out how to get it fixed without having to go without a laptop for the rest of my trip. They were kind of assholes about it, and I wound up having to just send the laptop in for repair. The next morning, I stopped by an electronics store and picked up a new laptop. Now I’m trying to sell the original HP to make up for some of the cost. As it turns out, there was in fact nothing wrong with the laptop itself. In spite of my pleas that, because their hardware died before I was able to get a recent backup, they not destroy my data if possible, HP wiped my hard drive apparently as their first step and sent the system back to me, apparently working. But it still didn’t work. Turns out it wasn’t the computer that was broken but was the AC adapter. So they sent me a new AC adapter, and the system works like a charm again, albeit without my data and with Windows running on it rather than Linux.

It was a good system. My only beef was that it was a little thick and heavy (I now have a Sony Vaio that feels paper thin by comparison). Sometine over the last few months, the case got cracked on the front left corner, and eventually, a fourish-inch piece of the molding snapped off. This appears to be a cosmetic thing only, and I’ve used the system without problems for months since the crack appeared.

If anybody’s interested in buying this thing, check out my auction at ebay. (I’m such a Luddite that this is the first time I’ve ever tried to sell anything there.) I’m asking $600 for a starting price and think that’s absurdly fair for a system like this. I’m hoping competition’ll eventually jack the price up to closer to $800 or $1000 (you’d be surprised how many hundreds of dollars some people will pay on ebay for real pieces of crap, by the way). If I get no bids, I’ll probably just find some group to donate it to and settle for a warm heart and a tax refund.