Spent 2.5 hours doing an online chat with the HP tech folks in India. I flummoxed the first two to the point of hanging up on/disconnecting me, and the last one finally tossed a free piece of hardware my way to get rid of me.
I’m nice. Really, I am! I never shouted, or swore, or got impatient, or said mean things. I just wanted to know why my laptop was shutting itself off, and what the “solutions” they were suggesting would accomplish, and why they were suggesting them. Also, the directions (obviously pulled from an online procedure manual) for some of them were incomplete, and I wanted clarifications (for e.g. one of them listed a series of steps, including removing the battery, but never said when to put the battery back). When they endeavored to explain what these solutions did, it seemed to me that they were unlikely to solve my issue, so I voiced my concerns and asked if they could address them. Apparently, that stumped them.
Well snartleblast.
After the second one disconnected me, the third one decided that it was an A/C adapter problem, despite the fact that I’ve never lost power or gotten a low battery error message, and the shut down is completely different from a “you need to charge your battery” automatic hibernation–which I explained to him several times. Also that it’s not a power surge because I’m plugged into a surge protector. But he decided that it was indeed a problem with the adapter, and he’s sending me a replacement.
Amusingly, when each one first started their chat with me, their English was flawless–obviously taken from a script. But as I asked harder and more in-depth questions, their grammar and vocabulary skills took serious nosedives. The poor things. Their spelling was still better than most Americans’, though.
So after two and a half hours and three help desk folks, I get a free A/C adapter. Um. That’s nice and all, but I’m dubious that this will fix my problem. I did do the steps they suggested: Power Drain, Reset the BIOS Defaults, Reinstall Power Management, and Disable “restart on system failure.” However I think it’s unlikely that will have accomplished anything–aside from wiping out any BIOS setting changes I might have made.
Well, a new A/C adapter will be nice. I can have one upstairs in the library and one downstairs in the living room. And I don’t feel like I totally wasted a huge chunk of my afternoon.
Oh yeah, my laptop shut itself off again this morning, about ten minutes after I started it. That implies to me that it’s not an overheating issue. I also tried to install a CPU temperature monitoring utility as per dude_the‘s suggestion, but I don’t think my laptop has the appropriate motherboard sensor that the utilities check and report on. And I can’t for the life of me figure out how to find out what make/model, etc. my motherboard is.
Hardware problems make me twitch.

Writing Stuff
New words: 600 on “Rue and Ruin.”
The time spent flustering the HP folks ate into my writing time. I also discovered I needed a bridging scene. Wrote that, and I still have one more scene to go. Getting there. Slowly . . .
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