A few days ago, Heather’s laptop suddenly didn’t have a wireless ethernet adapter.
That was rather interesting, mostly because the adapter is built-in so I didn’t expect it to go missing. A few minutes of tweaking and poking around convinced me that this really was happening, so I got online to see what I could find.
Turns out, this is a known issue with that model laptop. For reasons unknown to me, Hewlett-Packard decided that starting in 2010, even though this is caused by a known defect, they won’t fix it for free. If this would have happened a year ago, we would perhaps have been better off. Somehow heat causes damage to the motherboard, eventually causing the wireless to die. My research indicates this damage will continue to spread across the motherboard eventually killing the sound and video as well.
The Hewlett-Packard tech on the phone helpfully offered to repair the three-year-old laptop for $450… quite a bit more than the laptop is worth. When I pointed that out, he managed to find a $200 discount laying around somewhere. I was actually starting to think that maybe the repair would be such a bad option, even being three years old, it still surfs the internet without any problems. Then he informed me that the motherboard replacement came with a complementary drive-wipe.
Let me explain something here… there is ZERO reason for that! I suppose someone in their tech support staff realized that, without some preventive maintenance, computers start to get slower over time just to accumulated stuff. Our laptop does not have that problem. And speaking as a member of the technical support community (in a loose sense) I would rather people retained all their data instead of saying “whoa, this computer is so much faster after HP worked on it!” It makes me so sad whenever I hear people talk about loosing thousands of pictures thanks to the tech support people just nuking their machine and starting over. … and I better stop on that tangent or I will turn this into a 2000 word rant…
All of that being said, we can’t really live with the laptop being a wired-only model, because we already know its just a matter of time before it dies.
I have started looking into new laptops, and thought I should share this little chart. Notice who is on the “fail” end of the graph? Yeah… I wasn’t too happy with HP going into this process, and then seeing that (technically again, it was published in November) I realized there might be a reason for it.
The downside is that the $250 repair cost is not going to buy a one-to-one replacement for that behemoth of a laptop. All of my frugal living enthusiasm kind of points to doing the repair anyway. I am honestly still torn about that. The thing is, a three-year-old laptop is knocking on deaths door anyway, so patching it up isn’t a great use of money. The batter life is down to maybe 20 minutes unplugged, and will only continue to decay I am sure. That alone kind of makes the wireless connection issue silly… you have to keep it plugged into the wall just to use it with our without a wireless connection.
Stay tuned, it is only a matter of time before some sort of replacement is selected. (and it will be posted here, because… really I don’t always have that much to talk about)
-Jordan
Nelsons 