I shelled out $900 a year and a half ago for an HP Dv9000.  The guy at Best Buy assured me it was a fast, reliable machine.  Well, three months into owning it I noticed that my battery was losing its ability to hold a charge exponentially.  The longer I kept it plugged in, the less charge it would hold.  I remember taking a road trip with my laptop wired to the cigarette lighter of the car the whole damn time because if I disconnected it for more than five minutes my computer would die.  That was problem one.

Problem two was I couldn’t even let it sit on my lap for fear of burning the hair off of my legs or the computer shutting down due to overheating.  Um, it’s called a fucking laptop, not rest it on top of a refrigerated surface so it will work for more than 10 minutes top.

Problem three.  Because I constantly had to have the thing plugged in, the power jack soon began to falter.  Now, in order to use my $900 piece of crap I had to have it on top of a cool surface with the power cord wrapped back underneath it so that there was a little pressure on the jack area.

Problem four.  One night, after downloading an “important Vista update”  my computer just shut off completely.  ??? I turn it back on.  Kernel error?  WTF?  So I run the bios diagnostics.  Memory OK, Hard drive BAD.  Ok, I can deal with that, hard drives go bad.  Fortunately I never kept anything important on this machine (knowing it would give out on me soon).  So I go back to Best Buy, carrying the drive that failed me.  I ask the service guy in the computers department which would be the preferred replacement for the drive in my hand.  He shrugged his shoulders and pointed me to the “Geek Squad”  So, I walk over, stand in line for 45 minutes and overhear horror stories from the geeks about HP and how every other computer they service IS an HP.  Finally it’s my turn at the front of the line.  I ask the geek squad guy “Where can I find a replacement one of these?” while holding up the drive.

“Right there” he says pointing, “next to the sales attendant.”

Well, screw this, I ordered one online for half the price.  I wait a week for my drive to arrive.

Drive arrives.  Yay!  Let’s install this!  Ok! Installed! Now, let’s install… oh wait… no disks!  HP doesn’t even give you a recovery disk for their crap computer that will most DEFINITELY need to be recovery-ied! So, I download a demo version of windows 7.  Install.  Bad Install.  Wha?? Retry… bad Kernel… WHA??!? Fuck it.  I let the computer sit on my bookshelf for a month.  I don’t even care anymore.

Problem five.  I need Windows.  As  much as I hate that operating system, I need it to check my sites in IE.  Ok, let’s figure this damn box out.  I remove the memory and BAM it starts right up.  Amazing.  Fucking amazing.  So, I have it running, always plugged in, with no battery, no ram and a crack demo version of Windows just so I can see my sites on the crappiest monitor possible. This works great for… 2 weeks?

Problem six.

Fuck you HP.

-J