Tech support

A couple of months ago, my HP Spectre laptop started going wonky; symptoms included the power cable being loose in the USB port, and it kept getting worse.

I called around to a few local computer repair places. One told me they’d be happy to take a look, for $159, and then repair. Another said that there was only one place in the area (well—in Alexandria, across Fairfax County from me) that might be able to do that kind of repair, because the power ports on HP Spectres are welded to the motherboard, and that’s a tricky repair.

So I called that place, and the geek who picked up the phone was in his absolute element, being able to nerd-splain to me what such a repair involved. The key elements for me were that the operation would take at least a week (I was headed out to the Balkans in days), and the cost was not fixed. Coud be $this, could be $$$that, depending on what they needed to do.

So I ended up sending it to HP, where for $453 they replaced the motherboard (warrantee expired in April, one year after I bought it). I have to say that their service is fine—they did what they said they would do, when they said they would; they sent me super packing materials for shipping (including tape to seal the box); seems like it’s fixed.

(Fortunately, my previous laptop was still operational; that’s what I took with me on the trip.)

But hear me out: they replaced the motherboard. That means I have to reinstall everything—ev er-y-thing—on my machine. I moved all the files off before I shipped but they stripped all the apps, as well. I had to reinstall Office365; have to find and reinstall Bitdefender, Slack, Dropbox, SnagIt—even my bloody printer driver (which, between Microsoft and HP, is driving me batty). Also—I have to log into everything once again, meaning I have to remember, find or reset every single one of those passwords.

Furthermore—why has everything (Chrome, Firefox, Outlook, File Explorer) gone Darth Vader? They're all in dark mode, and I have to hunt out the settings to change them back to light. Plus, I had to stop Word and Outlook from feeding me predictive text. Ugh.

Technology is, as Dylan Thomas said of politics, bloody awful.