Color me impressed. The laptop’s already back in my grubby paws, with a new motherboard, and all is in working order again. The timeline:

• Sunday (July 13, 2008): First noticed funky behavior in the wireless card.
• Monday: It actually died; found HP’s support article about the problem. Called HP, scheduled a repair pickup.
• Tuesday: HP ships out an empty box to me.
• Wednesday: Empty box arrives, via FedEx Standard Overnight. I disassemble the notebook (removing hard disk, memory, and battery as instructed), pack it in the box, and drop it off for shipment.
• Thursday: It arrives at HP. HP evaluates, repairs, and ships it back to me, all in the same day.
• Friday: The repaired unit arrives back at the house. Purrs like a kitten now.

Damn. That’s good service — two day turnaround, and they actually fixed it. Spiffy. Great job, HP!

HP’s not screwing around this time (unlike my encounter with them when it came time to order a new power supply for my laptop early this year) — right on schedule, a box arrived for me today containing a prepaid shipping label, two strips of shipping tape (heh!), and packaging materials for the laptop. The prepaid label was for FedEx Standard Overnight service, and I managed to get the beast wrapped up and turned in at a local FedEx drop off spot, so this thing will actually get there tomorrow. Of course it may sit there in their lab for a week or two before it comes back, but at least it’s in the system and out of my hands now.

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