Freelancer's Office: Blog

After my desktop computer went down, I called Hewlett Packard and told them about the trouble.  They said to ship it back to them and they will repair the problem and send it back to me.  They’re even paying shipping both ways.  Now, I’m not so sure if this makes me feel better about buying another HP in the future, but at least they’re taking care of the problem without charging me for something that’s an issue with the computer.

I got the box from HP today via FedEx and am to ship it back to them with the computer in it.  They’ll fix the trouble and send me back my computer.  I’m going to see if they can also install a multi-monitor card while they have the thing - otherwise if I ever have another
problem with it then the thing won’t be configured right and it’ll just have this same old song and dance all over again.  With any luck they’ll be able to install a multi-monitor card for me and won’t charge me so much I can’t afford to have them install it.  We’ll just have to see though.  If they can, then I’ll be an HP convert rather than swearing them off entirely.

I now have a very nice HP Slimline paperweight on my desk.  The poor thing had serious malfunctions going on so I tried to reset it to factory specifications once again, this time telling it to trash everything and reformat the user’s partition of the hard drive.  That did not work out so well, the poor computer made it partway into that and went to the Blue Screen of Death, telling me there had been a major problem and it was shutting down to prevent damage to the computer.

I tried again to get it to start up, it’s not gonna, so I called my brother.  With luck he knows something about it that I don’t and can save the poor thing for me.   He won’t be out here till this evening, so today, despite the fact I don’t like to, I am forced to use my little laptop like it was a desktop computer.  ::wince:: I know that burns the poor things out, but I really don’t have any choice, I have to get some work done.

In desperate need of money to pay the bills, I have been trying to get back to work.  This morning I tried to log onto my desktop computer only to find that it is once again displaying the same symptoms it had when I was forced to reset it to factory specifications.  Whatever the trouble was, it has not been fixed by the last reset I had performed.  At the moment I am trying to get it to start up at all, and failing miserably.  I can’t use my little laptop as a full-time computer, it would burn the poor thing out to try that, so I am just doing whatever I can to figure out how to get the desktop computer working again.

It really really ticks me off that the thing has malfunctioned now, when I am least able to get a replacement for it.  I don’t know what I am going to do, but if the stress does not slack off it might just be to run down the road screaming.

I’m not sure what the story behind it is, but the PDF to Word converter that had been on today’s Giveaway of the Day is no longer in the offering, my assumption is that the Giveaway of the Day folks swapped out what was supposed to be given away tomorrow for the PDF to Word Converter pending their being able to contact those guys and find out why the activation was not working right, but I’m not sure.  I hope that it comes back up as a Giveaway of the Day, since I would love to get the chance to review that program for my writing blogs and websites.  There is no way I could afford to buy it, but I think it would be a very good tool for writers - three pages of conversion does not give me enough to guage the program by, however, so I’ll have to wait and see if it is offered up tomorrow or maybe later in the week when they sort out why it was not working as a download today.

Very  disappointed that it didn’t work today, but hopeful it’ll work out later on.  Going to go take a closer look at the offering that have for today.

The glitch won, I ended up having to reboot my computer and reset the whole thing to factory specifications.  Very very annoying, but at least it seems to have salvaged the computer as a whole and made it possible to avoid buying a new desktop computer.  That was not something I had been looking forward to the prospect of possibly having to do.