Well dammit, I guess my laptop felt left out of the Dead Hardware Parade. I’m posting this via that very laptop, tethered to my cellular phone for internet access, as its built-in wireless card has given up the ghost. According to Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, this laptop apparently has a bit of a “design issue” whereby it damn near melts itself down. The bulletin I linked there offers up a BIOS update that makes the system fan far more aggressive, but apparently it was too little, too late for this crazy little machine.

Wireless works occasionally, but mostly it’s dead. The Wi-Fi card doesn’t even show up in the device list in Vista, and in Linux, lspci -v doesn’t list it either. I actually had to go through the ritual of hard-resetting my cell phone to make its damned “wired tether” mode work again just to get this thing online at all. To their credit, HP are doubling the warranty period (just for this issue) and are sending a box along with a prepaid shipping label so I can send the monster back to them for repair. Given that they know about this specific issue and had trained the phone monkey in India (he had an obvious accent; sorry guys) how to deal with this directly, I suspect they’re just going to ship me a refurbished unit instead of mine back.

But we’ll see; it goes out the door to them Wednesday afternoon. This move coming up (to Tallahassee) is going to make the return shipment rather interesting

Technorati Tags: Dead Hardware Parade Geeky Rants