When I got home from University this afternoon, I found that (what appeared to be) my new laptop had arrived. However, it looked like it had been opened before, so I visited Comet’s website to see what their damage/returns policies were. Just as I was giving up on Comet’s website, which refused to give me the information I wanted, the doorbell went again, with another courier and what looked like another laptop

I checked the serial number on the outside of the first parcel, and discovered that it was the laptop I had sent back a week or two ago to Acer for repair! The second parcel was 100% new, factory sealed, and had several flyers from Comet in the parcel too, so I could tell where it was from. So I contacted LaptopShop who are now going to arrange a collection for the old laptop, which should happen in the next few days

I’ve now done the same thing I did with the first laptop – boot, setup, burn Acer’s recovery DVD, and format it with my own XP Pro (from my University’s MSDN). I had great fun spending another 10 minutes on the phone to Microsoft, typing the product ID numbers into their automated system, only for it to fail and forward me to an operator. I eventually got it activated for the third time after explaining that “Yes, it’s only installed on one PC” in about five different ways.

I haven’t installed Fedora Core 6 yet though, as I’m not sure how often I’d actually use it – I might prefer just to have the extra disk space.

And it hasn’t blown up (yet)!

Well it’s been a while since my new laptop broke. I contacted LaptopShop and requested a refund – the money arrived in my bank account today, so I’ve now ordered the same laptop from Comet

It should be delivered on Tuesday next week – hopefully it won’t die within 12 hours of me opening it like the last one did!

About two weeks ago I ordered myself a new laptop and a water-proof backpack for it. After some problems between LaptopShop and my bank, it eventually arrived here on Thursday afternoon

I booted it up, went through all the Windows XP OOBE stuff and then the Acer software installation wizards, created the recovery DVD and then formatted it with an nLited XP Pro CD, which I created from an ISO provided by my University’s MSDN. It installed fine, but it took me a while to find the drivers for the hardware and then copy them over on my USB stick. After that I had to call up Microsoft as I had activated the XP code on a VMWare installation – I forget why :P Once Windows was done with all the software I like, and then put Fedora Core 6 on the 25GB free space I had left while formatting.

I copied over my Steam installation from my PC, and a couple of other games – I tried Half Life 2 at 1280×800 (Widescreen): I got over 60FPS on it… Considering this is a laptop, that’s amazing
GTI Racing was a similar story, once I’d stopped it trying to load at 1280×1024 – runs perfectly at 1024×768 (no widescreen support).
Need for Speed: Most Wanted didn’t work so well – not that I really expected it to. It runs *ok* at 800×600 and medium settings, but nothing more. I didn’t buy the laptop for gaming though – it’s for writing notes, coding on, and other stuff I need it for at University.

After doing all the above on it, it was quite late, and I went to bed, leaving it plugged in to get a really thorough first charge. However, when I woke up, and tried to turn the laptop on, it refused to even make so much as a beep or idle whirring noise!

The power LEDs under the “on” button and on the front panel flashes for a fraction of a second when I try and turn it on, but nothing else happens. So I’ve been in contact with Acer Support several times, and they asked me to send the charger back – they will then test it, and either send me a new one, or repair/replace the laptop, if it isn’t the charger that’s causing the problem.

However I borrowed a multi-laptop charger (one of those £100 iGo things with about 15 different “tips”) and tested my laptop on it, but it didn’t charge properly, nor would it turn on. So it would seem that it’s the laptop that’s broken. So I will send Acer back the laptop, not the charger… Hopefully they’ll fix or replace the broken part(s) quickly, and not send me a new laptop – I don’t want to have to reinstall all my stuff, and spend 20 minutes on the phone with Microsoft again :P

Because of this problem, I haven’t been able to test stuff like the battery life, or even how good movies look on the screen (games look great though) – I will update this post when I have a working laptop again