Dystopian Paradise

However, I now have in my posession the new laptop I was hoping to get. I don’t remember how many times I took my old Toshiba back to Best Buy, but they finally “lemon’ed” it out. I am now typing this entry on a brand new HP Pavillion zv5000. In a nutshell it has the new AMD 64 bit processor ( ~2 Ghz ), 512 MB of RAM, 1 MB L2 Cache, and 1600 Mhz system bus. It’s a lot better than my poor little old 1.1 Ghz Celeron, 384 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, and it shows it too.

Right now I’m looking to install Windows XP 64 bit edition and see what the future has in store.

Anyway, just wanted to share.

Worst. Post. Ever.

I finally got my laptop back, sans repair, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Gone for 25 days for them to try and diagnose why my laptop sometimes wakes up from Standby on its own. So there I am standing at their repair center counter talking with the tech (not the one who worked on my computer) and I say, “What did they do to fix my laptop?” His response was a slightly underwhelming, “I dunno….let’s look….Hmmmm…It looks like they…..reinstalled the OS.”

You have got to be kidding me. My laptop was gone for 25 days for them to do what I could have done in 45 minutes? No way. I press him a little further. Do you have any more information on what they did? Sure, he shows me the steps they took in diagnosing the problem. The first step is labeled with a date nearly 20 full days after I gave them my laptop…20 days? What the heck was it doing during that time? Who knows…

So then, I bring it home. Boot it up for the first time, and guess what….Their idiot tech somehow screwed up the OS install…so here I am without a laptop for 3/4 of a month, and when I get it back, not only has it been wiped of my data, but oh yeah, for a little extra panache, I have to perform a system restore….which I would have done in the first place, if it had been a problem with the software, but it wasn’t!!!!

Anyway, so now I’m in a pickle, which by the way is a terrible place to be. What to do with the laptop that’s not safe to take in my bag, because it turns itself on, and will nearly melt before I notice… Do I send it in again for another possible 3 week trip, just to find out that they think it’s a software issue? Or do I just say screw it and suck it up? I think we both know the answer to this question. I politely walk into the store, laptop in tow, and, you know, “Burn the place down.” [Don't miss the 7th piece of trivia].

Needless to say, I’ll be without my laptop for a few weeks again soon. :(

So, in the ongoing saga of the slow death of my laptop, I stopped by Best Buy today to talk with a manager about the fact that their original estimate is now 100% wrong. Not only did they tell me I would have my laptop back after around 10 days, but now that it has been 20, they don’t know when I will get my laptop back. It could be as much as 8 weeks total time… (UGH!) So, anyway, if I’m a little short & infrequent, blame it on Best Buy.

On a completely unrelated note, I’d like to take a moment to discuss “The Apprentice” for a minute. If you’re ever looking for a classic picture of someone being railroaded, and cannot find any homeless people & a set of nearby railroad tracks, look no further than last Thursday’s debacle on “The Apprentice”. Now, granted, Mary J. was a nuicance at best, a hindrance at worst, and really only there because Trump’s got a thing for models, but to say that “I was the most afraid I have ever been in my life,” is a complete and utter lie. Honestly, I can’t believe she survived last week, but thanks to the “Bradford incident” she scathed by. Anyway, I’m just babbling at this point…but let me end with this. Very soon, I’ll be providing my top ten picks for the show, and then we can have the fun of seeing how terribly wrong I was.

My laptop is off to BestBuy for repairs again, it seems it wanted to wake up from standby whenever it is moved, so I thought it best to have them look at it. The good news is that this is my fourth repair, so the laptop is up for a “lemon review” to see if it should be replaced (let’s hope). The bad news, is that it’s going to be hard to update this until I get the laptop back, but for now, I’ll do my best…

So, tonight “The Apprentice” season 2 started. I’m pretty excited, since last season was so much fun to watch. I never thought I would get into the “reality TV” thing, as I had been able to successfully avoid “Survivor”, “Big Brother”, and somewhere around 5000 other replicas. I had been temporarily snared by “The Mole”, partially because it was Anderson Cooper (of Channel 1 fame) and partially because it was a thinking man’s game, but ever since that I haven’t ever been drawn to any “reality TV”. I pretty much stick to my staple Simpson’s augmented by the occasional “Friends” rerun.

All in all, now that I’m back on basic cable, I don’t really watch that much TV…Well, I’ve got to jet, time to get a spot picked out on the couch for the 2 hours of “The Apprentice” and the “Friends” spinoff, “Joey”.