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Monday, August 29, 2011

Computer fail

12:36 PM / Technology / 5 Comments

So I now have a shiny new laptop. Why? Reaching the end of my tether with my old ASUS UL30A, that's why. For the past three months or so, I've been getting random hard freezes when using anything multimedia-related - listening to MP3s, watching videos on YouTube, etc. When Lee and I recorded our Movie Matters giallo special with our friend Sandy Richardson back in June, the constant crashing caused us to have to postpone for a day while I desperately tried to troubleshoot the problem, and even after that, when we recorded a day later, my laptop crapped out mid-stream and the podcast only survived thanks to Lee's backup recording. Since then, the problem has continued. It's survived a BIOS update, a new hard drive, a complete reinstall of Windows... and I'd finally had enough. I'd been contemplating buying a more powerful laptop for a while (the UL30A has a fairly feeble CPU, which leads to great battery longevity but sluggish performance in the likes of the notoriously badly coded Final Draft 8 screenwriting software), and now seemed like as good a time as any to bite the bullet.

So I bought a Mac.

Just kidding. (Although I did recently pick up an aluminium Apple keyboard, so Mr. Jobs finally managed to squeeze some money out of me.) I actually bought an HP Pavilion DM4-2000EA. For £600, this gets me 4 GB of RAM, a 2.1 GHz Core i3 processor, a 500 GB 7,200 RPM hard drive, and a decent-ish "up to 7 hours" of battery life (though in reality you're not actually going to get that much out of it, unless you plan to use those seven hours to stare at the desktop wallpaper).

And you know, I'm pretty pleased with it. It's quite a bit noisier than my old ASUS, and the battery life isn't as impressive, but these are concessions I'm happy to make in the name of improved performance - you wouldn't believe how much smoother everything feels going from a mobile Celeron processor to a Core i3. Plus, the whole not crashing thing is a big perk. There are some niggles - the USB ports are so tight I almost wrecked my memory stick trying to pull it out, and I was having issues with keystrokes intermittently failing to register... though, oddly enough, removing the battery for ten minutes, acting on advice I came across on a tech forum relating to a different model, fixed this, and the problem has yet to recur (touch wood).

Of course, I'm now £600 out of pocket - not a good situation to be in with my university fees due to be paid before too long. I suppose now I need to get in touch with ASUS and see if they'd be willing to perform a repair on an out of warranty laptop. What d'you reckon my chances are?

5 Comments

 
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