Technodrama - The End Game

Imagine my surprise when I got the email from Woot.com saying that I could return my Toshiba POS laptop a mere 3.5 weeks after I sent them the email requesting to return it!

My first reaction was Woooooooooooot! LOL, yes, Woooooooooot!

After the first week of owning the Toshiba, I had purchased an HP laptop from Sam's in the hope that I would be able to return the Toshiba but had given up hope and returned it to Sam's and instead called Toshiba to purchase an extended warranty to insure that I would have a functional laptop for at least 3 years instead of the mere 18 months that my last HP lasted.

Sigh.

My next reaction was CRAP! I have an extended warranty!

After the nice lady at Toshiba Direct said they would refund me the extended warranty I was back to Wooooooooooooot! and raced out the door to Sam's Club.

I was not looking forward to all the time it was going to take to set up the new HP but I'd been through it once so I was sure that it would take much less time this time around. It turned out to be even easier when I remembered that I had posted about all the software I had to load. I headed straight to that post after I un-installed all the bloatware that came pre-installed and went straight down the list item by item and installed most everything I needed.

A few things had to wait for me to import my Outlook email so I could have my product keys. All in all it went very well and significantly faster than it did the first time.

Toshiba, Old HP, New HP

The only hitch came when I installed my Office 2003. Turns out I had registered too many copies. Sigh. I was on the phone with Microsoft to explain to them that I wasn't trying to cheat them and I would be returning the laptop that I had just recently install the software on. After about 45 minutes on the phone with them they gave me a validation code and I was up and running.

The next challenge was getting all the data off the Toshiba and onto the new HP. Turns out the whole Vista networking thing is a pain in the ass. I ended up using an SD card to transfer many of the files. Luckily I hadn't been using the Toshiba long enough to amass a lot of files.

So far the biggest difference is the performance. For some reason the Toshiba processor would get maxed out when I would run Skype, Full Tilt and Realtime. The HP barely breaks a sweat. The HP also has two hard drives for a total of 200GB. The Toshiba only had one 120GB. Those of you that know of my penchant for downloading poker shows and movies see the problem here: not enough hard drive. I'm delighted with my extra hard drive and have already loaded a ton of poker content that I seed via PokerBay.

Shipped the Toshiba off to Woot yesterday. This horrible chapter of my computing life will be over once and for all when I get my credit on my credit card.

I'm delighted with my HP and hope to never have to use the 1 year extended warranty I purchased. I guess you can say I've lived and learned.