Let me start off by saying that I learned to program computers on an old HP mini computer. My first programmable calculator was an HP. My first laser printer was an HP. A good friend of mine from high school graduated from Caltech, then went to work for HP.

So, when it was time for me to buy a new laptop computer back 2003, it was a no brainer for me. I went to my local Best Buy and looked at their choice of laptops and decided to go ahead with my purchase of the HP Pavilion ze5470us because I wanted a powerful CPU and didn’t care about size or battery life.

Although it was an expensive ($1,800), bulky and very hot running notebook, I didn’t mind it because it was relatively fast (at the time). But after about 6 months, I noticed that when the unit got hot, the LCD screen would start to flicker in a strange way. It was one of those things that wasn’t bad enough to take in for repair but was annoying.

After a few more months, the problem became worse and I had to take it to Best Buy for repair. Luckily, I bought the extended service plan thinking that notebooks are fragile. Unfortunately, it took one week to send to the repair shop, one week for them to look at it, and one week for them to ship it back. When it came back, they said nothing was wrong.

To make matters worse, there didn’t seem to be any communications between the Geek Squad (the Best Buy in house repair guys) and the out sourced company that was actually doing the fixing. I took the notebook back home and suffered with the problem for several more months.  Eventually, I figured out that the computer must be on for about 4 hours before it was hot enough for the failure to occur.  I took it back to the Geek boys at Best Buy and told them that it was a heat related problem, but only after a few hours.

This story is getting boring and long, so I’ll just get to the point. I sent the unit back 6 times. 2 of the times, they were not able to figure it out. In that time, they replaced the LCD, the LCD circuitry, the keyboard, and the hard drive. Pretty much, they replaced everything except the motherboard. 

During this period, I got sick of not having a notebook so I bought a Toshiba notebook. It worked perfectly and I still use it to this day. When the HP finally broke down again, Best Buy told me I could get a new notebook that was the same price or less. I decided to get another Toshiba. I’ve been happy with both.

Now, you’d think that I would learn my lesson with HP. No way. When I needed a new desktop in 2004, I went back to Best Buy and got the HP Media Center PC m1070n. I took it out of the box, booted it up, and after about 40 minutes, the mouse would freeze. After 2 more tries, I took it back to Best Buy. To their credit, they gave me a brand new one without asking any questions.

Next, I bought an external hard drive that plugs into the desktop directly from HP. When I plugged it in, there was no power. Upon opening the unit, I discovered that the power cable, as well as the data cable to the second CD player were not plugged in. Luckily, I’ve built PCs from scratch so I knew where all the cables should plug in, and everything worked fine thereafter.

For fun, I decided to call the HP support 800 number to see if they would be able to talk me through pluggin the cables in. The call was directed to a support person in India who was obviously reading scripts from his computer screen. He was not able to help me and the engineer who could, was not available. They told me they would call me back but never did.

Not learning a damn thing, I bought a HP psc 2510 printer/scanner/FAX machine about the same time. Fortunately, that has been working flawlessly to this day. I guess HP still knows how to make printers.

On a side note, the HP LCD that I got with the desktop blew out it’s power supply about one year after I got it. I replaced it with a Sumsung LCD which has been working very nicely to this day. I do like my HP Media Center though. It has slots for just about every memory card you can think of, including the ones that go into my Canon digital camera and my LG cell phone. The video inputs on the front behind a cover is nice too.

So will I get another HP? I don’t think so. But I’ve been looking at the new Vista loaded HP desktops and they look pretty. But I’d be a moron to get another one.

I do recommend their printers though.

I saw this on TV. What do these codes do?

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

How Things Work and Not Work.

I hardly ever use my land line so to save money, I decided to switch to Vonage.  For those who have not seen their TV ads, it’s a company that provides VOIP (voice over IP) via your broadband internet connection.  I wish I could get rid of a land line completely but I still need to FAX and buzz people into the building. I wasn’t sold on the idea but decided to try it.

Got the box in the mail in 2 days, plugged it in as per the instructions, and to my shock, it worked the first time with no problems whatsoever.  Even my FAX worked.  It gives you a voice mail and all the other usual goodies (caller ID, forwarding, call waiting, etc) and unlimited long distance calls.  Nice.

I was so amazed at how easy this was to get working, I decided to continue my tech trek.

I have a Tivo so I decided to sign up for the Amazon movie/TV show download program called “Unbox”, which gives you $15 for free when you sign up.  The way it works is, you choose a movie you want to “rent” and it downloads it to your Tivo so you can watch it on your regular TV (instead of having to watch it on your computer).  It all sounded good and it’s free so I tried it.  After 2 calls to the Amazon Unbox customer service (waiting about 20 minutes each time), it still doesn’t work.  I decided to give up on it.

So I’m 1 for 2. That’s 50%.

Then, I read on Engadget that Verizon (my old landphone carrier) sued Vonage and won an injuction for infringing on their patent to connect phones via the Internet to other phones.  Not only does Vonage have to pay like $56M, they might have to close up shop. Son-of-a-$(%#!

So now I guess I’m 0 for 2.

MS decides to not make the Zune compatible with the other MP3 players and music websites.  It came out this week.  Zzzzzz

PS3 comes out at the end of this week.  Blue-ray, blue-tooth, blue-balls. It’s all blue. As “Gears of War” comes out for the 360 this week, Sony says they might not be able to deliver the measly 400k units for the U.S.  So the retailers are scrambling telling their pre-order game fanatics they may not get their PS3, but they get a free DVD.  Huh?  Why does Sony even bother to have billboards and TV commercials for the PS3 when it’s already sold out of units!

Nintendo’s Wii also comes out this month.  It actually will have some “real” games on day one, unlike the PS3.  I guess Nintendo knows games.

MS dropped the part in Vista that was going to change the entire file system to be a relational database to make searches faster.  To see how this makes a difference, I’ll give you a perfect real life example.

I needed to look for a specific file that I knew the name of on my WinXP based system.  I used XP’s explorer to do a search for the file on my drive “C”.  No wildcards.  A specific filename.  Chunk, chunk, chunk. Anytime this decade would be nice.

After about 5 minutes of waiting, I got bored and opened up a browser window and googled my own address for fun.  In 0.41 seconds, I got a list of websites that had my address in it.  One was an article written by somebody at the same address about some weird scientific stuff.  Another one was a website that had a game that was a copy of an old game I wrote in the 90′s.  Some other weird ones that looked at too.

In the mean time, my search for the file continued.  After doing some other work, I noticed the hard drive went quiet so I looked and sure enough, after about 20-30 minutes, XP finally found my 1 file.

There you have it.  The difference between XP’s (and presumably Vista’s) file structure for searching vs. Google.  Is this a fair comparison?  Not really. XP only went through about 5k of directories, maybe 50k-100k of files in 30 minutes.  Google found my results from several million websites on the Internet in 0.41 seconds.  Hmmm.

In XP’s defense, their system does not take up any space on the hard drive, whereas google’s method would probably take up about 1G of hard drive space.  Will I give up 1G to save 30 minutes?  With the way prices are with hard drives, the answer is now yes.  10 years ago, no.

So I look forward to Vista’s release in 2007.  It will be slow and beautiful.

Oh, sorry.  Have to go do another search.

Downloaded the new MS IE7 to check it out.

Pros:
Like Firefox, it has tabs on top for multiple windows inside one version of the app.  You can even get a “summary” type page with thumbnail views of all the tabbed pages.

RSS feed reader. Simple version but at least they put something in.

More compliant to standards.

Cons:
Bugs. If you open too many tabs with complicated websites, it will crash. Don’t try to open up too many Youtube pages in tabs.

Unfortunately, like Firefox, being compliant to standards mean that some websites that are not compliant do not work properly.  In the past, I would switch back to IE6 from Firefox when pages did not work properly.  Now, what?

Can’t move the toolbars anywhere you want.  You can move them a little but they prevent you from moving all of it.

Did I mention the bugs?

Now that Google bought Youtube for $1.6B, buying Myspace for just $500M+ seems like a bargain.  Some analysts are predicting that Myspace will be worth $15B in 3 years.  These numbers they talk about are so beyond my comprehension.  I have trouble balancing my checkbook.

It’s very interesting how the media keeps coming out with stories of how kids are being hunted down by preditors via myspace.  They interview parents that are shocked at the information that their kids are putting on their myspace profile.  Is this supposed to be something new?  Cracks me up.

It won’t be long before myspace is blamed for terrorists communicating with each other over the Internet.

Well, once again, I’ve learned a little more about myspace.  I’ve noticed there seems to be a lot of weird minor bugs where sometimes the same link will work and other times it will give an error message.  By just pressing back, then repeating the link will cause it to work.  Weird.  It’s amazing such a big site has so many little bugs.

I tried to use the function to check my email address book against the entire myspace website list.  It almost worked except you get an error near the end.  So instead, after I got my list of people who have myspace accounts, I had to manually add each person as friends.  The automated method gives a weird error message.  Out of something like 350 people in my address book, 47 or so had myspace accounts.  Pretty amazing how popular this website is.

Now I’m actually trying to really use myspace.  For the first time, I’m trying to use it at 3-4pm PST and it is slower than dial-up, not to mention I get timeout related errors, JPGs not displaying and other weird traffic related (I assume) problems.  It’s borderline unusable.

I predict that if they don’t fix this soon, somebody else is going to do them in, like myspace did to frendster.