Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Gateway to hell

Got word today the manufacture of my laptop does not consider the broken hinge something they will repair under warranty. The estimate to repair it was more than half the price I paid for the machine in the first place. I won't be paying the $460-plus dollars to fix a machine I've had less than a year, mostly only used at home and which has crashed (meaning software/booting type crashed, not fallen) so hard twice that I had to restore the software and the latest crash wiped out all the data on the hard drive.

Nope, not worth fixing in my mind.

This old, slow computer is driving me nuts. Everything takes so long. Was it always this slow, or does it just seem slowers because CPUs are so much faster than they were when I bought this one? Or perhaps it is crappying out too in sympathy for its laptop brother made by the same company. I liked this old desktop machine and it is a reason I chose the manufacturer I did when I bought the laptop. But now this old workhorse don't want to work no more. But I'm going to have to live with it for a while until I can save up my pennies for a new machine, which will probably be another desktop model. For one thing, it will be cheaper than a laptop. And for another, I'm a bit leary of investing penny's I don't have in a portable machine to be my main computer now.

This last experience has made me gun shy about laptops, even though I loved the convenience of having one. Maybe I can nurse my fractured one along for a while. But do I dare load it back up with music again? Or photos? Not without a backup external drive, which is another expense I can't afford.

So I don't know what I will do. All I know is that when I am ready to move forward to get another computer, I WILL NOT be going through a Gateway to get there.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

In 1975 I didn't own a television. In 1945 my mother used a timer to regulate her rare long distance phone calls. I paid 9 cents to get into the local movie house. In high school I learned how to insert carbon paper between white sheets in order to make multiple copies--colored sets of carbon-ready tissue paper were a boon!

Now we're buying computers from cubic Holsteins. Whoo!

(My new Vista machine works well in some instances, others--well, I wish Vista supported Outlook Express.)

(P.S. The Vista has a cable tv plug!)

(P.S. II--if you'd been raised Catholic, you could offer up your suffering to the poor souls in Purgatory, now that Vatican II has been repealed.)

Unknown said...

Update: This morning I spent nearly an hour on the phone with an HP tech supporter.

It turned out that the DSL modem went berserk, but for an hour the machine wouldn't boot...just that little circular icon doing its gerbil routine.

Madding.

Gotta love the 21st century.

The G-man said...

I hope my computer problems are not proving contagious.

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