As I've mentioned to a number of people, my
nx6325 randomly quit working a few days ago. I'm not entirely sure what happened: the machine unexpectedly powered off while I was editing a photo in Photoshop. Two days of attempts to boot the machine gave the same result: the power light would come on and then fans would spin, but the unit wouldn't produce any video, wouldn't POST, wouldn't beep if I overloaded the key buffer, and for that matter wouldn't even heat up after half an hour. It came with a standard three-year warranty, so after a bit of research and finding that the near-universal solution to this problem was a mainboard replacement, I sent the machine back to HP.
That was three weeks ago.
This experience, for the most part, has shown me that I'm hopelessly dependent on my notebook. For the remainder of the first week after shipping the unit, I began using my Pentium 3 tower full-time, using pen and paper elsewhere. It turns out that I can never remember where I put a notepad, so I instead dug out an old relic: my dad's 386SX notebook. For two weeks it ran pure DOS with the MS-DOS Editor and Telnet preloaded onto a floppy, which for a time worked perfectly. It also meant that, since DOS has no provisions for multitasking, that assignments were relocated to my hand, arm, and leg. Considering the obvious health risks and sheer stupidity of the idea, I ended up just yesterday preloading a stripped-down Windows 3.1 system onto a single 1.44mb floppy, including DOS, Program Manager, Multipad, Calculator, and Cardfile. It's quite easy to tell that your productivity has hit an all-time low when you begin considering Cardfile a must-have application. I'm currently using it as a combination assignment notebook and day planner.
Let's face it: the caliber of apps that I worked with on the nx6325 simply won't run efficiently enough on a P3 tower. As a result, I've lost a good deal of time attempting Web design under Visual Web Developer 2005 on this machine. What I could have easily pulled off in two hours became a nightmare of a weekend, mainly due to the fact that I had to compile locally and test remotely on a server, since I kept encountering out-of-memory errors while running the development server. Any changes essentially meant re-uploading the entire site. My MP3 collection has effectively been reduced to a few hours worth of CDs, and listening to the same CDs on repeat wasn't such a pleasant experience.
In the meantime, HP has only acknowledged that my laptop is now in Costa Rica. The repair guys haven't opened the box yet. Due to "technical difficulties", they weren't able to use the first support ticket I created, so I ended up having to create a second ticket. This, of course, delayed the unit's ETA by a few weeks. Meanwhile they've been sending empty boxes to my doorstep, for reasons unknown.
Considering the fallout of my decision, I'm beginning to wonder whether or not it was worth it to send the unit back to HP. The local computer shop down the street from my house may void the warranty, but at least the unit wouldn't take months to come back!