Bye-bye HP, Hello Acer

Some time ago, shortly after the launch of Windows Vista, my wife Penny bought an HP Pavilion DV6204EU laptop, mainly because it looked nicer than the other laptops we saw. Pity it didn't work better. Now the thing has finally died: it won't connect to the network, or to the printer or scanner, and the CD/DVD drive hasn't worked for months.
So she finally agreed to let me replace her laptop, and yesterday we took delivery of a spiffy new Acer eMachines E725 laptop, with Windows 7, 4GB RAM, and a 320GiB hard drive. Now the fun begins, transferring all her old files and reinstalling all her programs. I hope the 64-bit OS doesn't cause too many hassles. At least the new machine can run Spinrite and report the HDD temperature.
I have bought 8 laptops in the last 5 years (4 were gifts, one was a replacement for a machine I spilled water on). Only the HP and an IBM ThinkPad have given us grief. Similarly, the HP printer still doesn't work properly on Windows Vista. As a result I will not willingly buy another HP product. Maybe they should revert back to their original name: Hewlett-Packup.

HD Tune Pro helps keep laptop alive

I have always recommended HD Tune for use in monitoring the temperature of a laptop hard drive, but never thought I'd use it as a maintenance tool. It was only recently, after Penny's HP Pavilion DV6204EU laptop started doing wierd things, that I decided to try out the new HD Tune Pro to see if it could tell me anything about her hard drive.
I have always been frustrated with her laptop, since the laptop blocks or hides the SMART information on the drive, and SpinRite won't run. So the normal preventive maintenance gets really tricky, and I have never had the courage to remove the drive and plug it in to a different machine to run SpinRite. After installing the trial version of HD Tune Pro I ran the "Error Scan" and discovered to my horror that there were multiple bad sectors on the drive. This could easily explain why the laptop was freezing from time to time. Next, I ran "chkdsk /R" to get Windows to move any data from those regions, and mark them as bad.
The screen shot above shows the result: the bad sectors are in red, and the rest of the drive seems to be OK. It also shows the "Speed Map" of the drive, with the faster regions near the outside. I'll be monitoring it for further bad sectors, and plan on replacing the whole thing as soon as funds permit. Had HP not blocked access to the SMART information, these problems could have been avoided a long time ago. I won't be replacing it with another HP laptop either; Acer never had this problem.
I have published a more detailed review of HD Tune and SpinRite on my new reviews site. Benchmarks are still under way.

HP's Vista Shortsightedness

When we bought our HP Laserjet 1020, Windows Vista was in its advanced Beta stage. Nonetheless, when Vista came out and we bought Penny's HP Laptop with Vista Home Basic preinstalled, the driver was not ready.
When the driver shipped in May last year, it was worse than the WinXP driver, putting black lines down the side of the page, on both WinXP and Vista. Needless to say I was not impressed. A year later the driver has not been updated.
Yesterday I went to buy a replacement toner cartridge, and noticed that the Samsung ML-1640 printer cost less than the toner cartridge. So not only has HP lost out on the sale of a R750 toner cartridge for the 1020, it has also lost out on the sale of a R12000 laptop (I didn't even look at HP/Compaq laptops last month) and once the 1020 finally conks out we will probably replace it with a Samsung or Lexmark colour printer.
All this because HP were too cheap to do a decent driver for the 1020. Not only does the Vista driver put lines down the side of the page whenever a graphic is printed, but the only way to print anything from another PC is to send it to the shared printer, and then reboot the host PC to get it to print. Not any more, since buying the ML-1640. HP knows how to annoy its customers, and it has done so really well.

Windows Vista still sucks after 16 months

When it launched, I commented that all those people floundering around in the video represent the new Vista users figuring out how to make the damn thing work. Now, after a full year and a service pack, plus numerous security updates, it's time to take another look at Vista.
We tried for a long time to suffer along with the UAC ("User Annoyance Control") message, but eventually I gave up. The time it has taken for the dialogue box to come up and then go away again after clicking has increased progressively over time: 10-15 seconds waiting is just too long, when CCleaner only takes about that long to run. So now we have to put up with Annoyance #2: the warning message that Annoyance #1 is switched off.
Vista Service Pack 1 fixed my other main gripe: printing. Our HP1020 printer is connected to Penny's Vista machine, and each time I wanted to print out a page I would have to send the page to the shared printer, and then go to her machine and reboot it to get the page to print. I kid you not! After SP1 I can now print correctly. It was nice of Microsoft to make me wait over a year for this bug fix. Shared printers are obviously not big in Redmond.
Of course the related bug is still not fixed: the HP 1020 driver for Vista and XP makes horrible little black rectangles down the right hand margin of the page whenever graphics are used. HP is unlikely to fix this because they don't care about their old HP1020 customers. So I will probably not buy another HP printer, even though I have owned 3 or 4 over the years. Enough is enough.
That gets rid of the main issues. But of course Office 2002 still doesn't work with Vista correctly, and there is no sign of a bug fix either. Each time Penny wants to collect her email Outlook 2002 asks for her password. It doesn't do this on my XP machine, and I have exactly the same version of Outlook. I'm not prepared to spend a fortune upgrading to a newer version of Outlook just to fix this bug.
Speaking of upgrades, I'm not prepared to spend money upgrading Office 2002 just to get the Office Assistant (i.e. Clippy) to work either. I'm not even sure if Office 2007 has one, but it has those dreadful toolbars and no option of a menu, so Microsoft in all its wisdom has lost another Office customer.
Then there is the brain dead "Power Off" button in Vista that actually does a "Standby" (there is NO hibernate option) instead of a "Shut Down". I finally found out from Paul Thurrott how to change it, so now at least it does what it is supposed to.
Vista Home editions don't have a "fax" option, unlike Windows XP, so each time we need to send a fax from home (we don't have a fax machine at home) we have to use the modem in my laptop, because I'm still running WinXP. Another Microsoft brainwave: the fax option is only available in the Business editions of Vista, because fax machines are found in most offices, but not in most homes. Genius!
So if I get a laptop with Vista on it, I'll probably have to get the Business edition, and hope that it can do "home" things like play music and DVDs. Only time will tell. Of couse, I can't to an "anytime upgrade" because that isn't available to HP South Africa customers. I guess I probably won't be buying an HP laptop after all.

Vista Anytime Ripoff

Before we bought a machine with Microsoft Windows Vista on it we did "all" the required research: which devices we use are compatible (HP printer, IBM Scanner, MP3 Player, Digital Voice Recorder, Digital Camera) and ended buying a new scanner since the old one doesn't work.
We also read the reviews of Vista, particularly Paul Thurrot's exhaustive reviews, and so when we went to the Cresta branch of Incredible Connection we could look at all the laptops on display, and check out the different models and products.
The laptop Penny liked was pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Basic edition, and seemed to be OK. After all, the laptop comes with a Fax Modem and a DVD drive, so one would expect it to be able to send faxes and watch DVDs. If not, we could easily upgrade to Vista Home Premium or whatever in order to get the "missing" pieces. After all, the "Windows Anytime Upgrade" icon was right there in the Control Panel. Wrong! Microsoft lied to us, and continues to mislead its South African customers. The "Windows Anytime Upgrade" facility is not available in South Africa. The icon in the control panel is misleading, because the facility isn't available in South Africa.
Phoning their call centre didn't help. The person who took my call told me I'd have to buy an upgrade and reinstall Vista from scratch. Wrong. The upgrade install does not wipe out all existing applications. At least in theory, anyway. We'll never find out, because of the inexcusable cost of the "upgrade": R 2370 for Ultimate (US$320), R 1821 for Business editions (US$245). "Windows Fax and Scan, available in the Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions of Windows Vista". Notice how none of the Home editions are mentioned, in spite of the fact that most homes don't have fax machines, but offices do. And you thought the marketing boys at Redmond were brighter than average. I think not.
The Microsoft SA person I spoke to on the phone said I should have asked for a different version to be pre-installed. That's a bit like telling a car owner he should have chosen the 3litre version instead of the 1600: it sucks. The damage is already done.
Now if we need to send faxes we use my Windows XP Professional machine. I guess we'll have to find a $30 faxing program to send faxes if my laptop stops working. I'm certainly not increasing the cost of a R6999 laptop by another 30% or so just to be able to use the fax modem.

Vista Launch Video | What the WOW stands for | Digg this story

Dear HP, where did my 80GB drive go?

Penny's new HP Pavilion notebook is beautiful. She loves the shiny finish, the DVD remote control, and the overall design of the notebook. But like many beautiful things, it has its trouble spots.
According to the advertised specifications, the unit has an 80GB drive.
According to Spinrite, the drive size is 80,026,361,856 bytes, which is only 74.53GB. An 80GB drive would be 85,899,345,920 bytes, since there are 1024MB in 1GB, and so on. So that means that 6.8% of my drive is vapourware!
To add insult to injury, the drive is partitioned into a "recovery" partition and a "working" partition, and the working partition is only 69.3GB. The other partition is for drivers and the Windows Vista install files, which I can't use because the backup software doesn't work.
So the advertised 80GB drive is effectively a 69.3GB drive. The missing 10.7GB is either "shrinkage" or badly configured. That's a loss of 13.3%! Thanks for that, Hewlett Packard!
Update: since posting this article on Digg, several readers have said that I was supplied with an 80GB (SI units) drive, not an 80GBi drive. How nice: as a consumer I am expected to "know" that when the specs say "up to 2GB" in the case of RAM they mean 2048MB, but when referring to hard drives they mean 2000MB. What nonsense!

Digg this story | HelloPeter complaint

What the Windows Vista WOW stands for

After battling to get Penny's new HP dv6204eu laptop with Windows Vista to work, I've concluded that the "WOW" stands for "Will Office Work?"
Using Office 2000 has turned out to be a disaster. The Office Assistant hangs, and you only get the default "Clippy" assistant. If you try to choose a different one, you get an "out of memory error". And every time I open Outlook 2000, it thinks it has been installed for the first time (?!) as shown in the screen shots below:
Then there is the problem about making the recovery disk, because HP are too stingy to provide the DVD media. The utility to create the media only runs once, and it crashed, so now we have to order the DVD from HP and it involves a whole load of paperwork. I took this screen shot while it was working. It got to 80% and then crashed. Since its only designed to run ONCE, this wasn't particularly helpful.