New Computer Chapter 3

Things always blow up on a holiday weekend. Just when I thought the replacement HP Envy was the machine I’d be using for the next (hopefully) 5 years or so, trouble came knocking at my door. Yesterday morning, I had breakfast, hibernated the machine. Took a shower, got dressed. Maybe 45 minutes elapsed time. When I turned on the machine again I saw this ugly blue UEFI you’re totally screwed screen.

Burnt a Ubuntu DVD to run Ubuntu FROM DVD on my server. It seemed to indicate a hibernate issue (?).

I sent the blue screen image to my new contact (the Director Signature Experience Labs) from Microsoft Store within minutes of seeing it appear. He called me. Yup, on a Sunday, a holiday weekend, 7am Redmond time, within 15 minutes of my emailing the sad news. While were talking, I booted to advanced recovery and tried to run some powercfg cmds to delete the hibernate file, but they are apparently no longer supported. However, when I exited the machine surprised me and BOOTED into windows. I immediately started copying my data off (and spent the balance of the day yesterday getting my data copied off the HP onto two separate external devices to have redundancy).

I had met with him personally (the Microsoft Director, Signature Experience Labs), just last Wednesday when he came to collect the two machines that were “rejects” (one was the original bad hardware HP Envy 17 and the second was a miss-shipped 15 inch laptop from the same family). During lunch last week, we were discussing various laptops and I had mentioned that I had also been looking at the ASUS ROG 17 incher with the same specs (except for the touch screen) but since there weren’t any in the stores (mail order only I guess, I wasn’t all that keen on getting something sight unseen. Even Best Buy didn’t have any from that family to check out (just to look, feel, etc., not to buy from them). We discussed whether there is an issue with this HP ENVY TouchSmart 17-j141nr model machine (they don’t have enough data on returns) which is now my feeling. He is replacing this HP machine with the ASUS ROG-G750JS-DS71. (We agreed that two lemons are more than enough and trying to see if a third unit would be disaster free wasn’t a good game plan).

The reviews of the AUS ROG G750JS-DS71 everywhere are pretty awesome. I had looked at this computer before purchasing the HP but couldn’t justify the additional $$ for the ASUS. I’m going to have to go through all the setup stuff again, upgrade to 8.1 update 1, update to the Windows Media Center Pro feature pack, install my apps, copy in my data. Will probably take two days plus to set up the ASUS. Which I am hoping will arrive this week. I’ll hopefully have shipping details tomorrow.