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)!