HP and me, looks good so far

Some of you know my penchant for HP printers is historically heavy with bias to any others.

Others know I have a new Lenovo Ideapad. As Dilbert said once, I hope she doesn't ask about the laptop.

Others will recall seeing me with my gargantuan elephant of a 17" screen laptop at LS08. Well this elephant, an HP 9027US is headed back to HP. It seems, hard to believe I know, that this laptop can run a bit hot and evidently leads to a problem in the left hinge area.
I found this out the other night when opening my laptop produced a gut hurting CRACK and I knew immediately what happened. I was upset, what had I done, I take such great care of this monster? Well started trolling the internet looking for advice on where to get a new piece of plastic frame and such as we DIY people do and was pointed to a website from HP dedicated to this exact problem.

Realizing my laptop was out of warranty, it is now an elderly 20 months old, just slightly older than my baby, I figured I was out of luck. But no, my serial number and part number and all are included for a free repair, including shipping.

Needless to say I was ecstatic and depressed at the same time. I could get it fixed, yes, but I had already thought about looking into new laptops.

As a Lenovo dealer in Thinkpads and Ideapads you can bet what I will be next time.

So they are sending me a box to Fedex it back and after about 10 business days, or in normal terms about 3 weeks, my laptop will return.

So good news for the Ideapad, it gets to run around a bit more now. Now if I can just fix a quirky Wi-Fi problem on the Ideapad all will be well. So if you try to ping me Tuesday and i am not online, its because I am backing my hard drive up from the laptop to some other drive...just in case.

S10e Update, Ideapad to the Rescue

I started my review of the Ideapad from Lenovo and while Lotusphere will be the true test, I have some feedback to everyone.
Especially @olufsphere who really wants one.

1st I have a 3cell battery. Do I care? No, because on full power it lasts for over 2 hours .....easily.
On extreme power saver(or whatever you want to call it) it seems to last forever. Again, Lotusphere 2009 will be the test, live blogging indeed!

So for those that ask, it runs an Atom processor, you know I bumped the RAM up to 1.5GB total and comes with a paltry 80GB drive. Note to Lenovo, small doesn't mean limited disk space! There are larger drives, ahem, available, but my guess is they are more than this cost($50 more upfront if I could get that model, not likely to be $50 to upgrade the drive). Still if any Lenovo people will be at Lotusphere I would be happy to test drive your larger drives on a long term basis.

So how did I test it? Well I loaded Lotus Domino 8.5, Lotus Notes 8.5 and Admin client, throw in twirhl(my Twitter program), Skype, Norton whatever came with it(being removed as I write), plus the usual pieces and parts and was running it along with Firefox on a site with a video on how to remove your door panels for a 2002 Camaro, hint, don't do this while your baby daughter(1.5 yrs) is sitting in the from driver's seat. Although she learned a lot about wiring and taking the door apart :-)

I had to replace my front passenger side speaker, um, blew it playing something too loudly, toss up between Hendrix, Guns n Roses, Aerosmith and Billy Squier. But the new speaker sounds beautiful, maybe I will review that one day, in any event I couldn't drive to Lotusphere with a bad speaker for 2.5 hours could I?! Taking Notes Podcasts would sound horrible.

So all this was running in the background, occasionally closed the lid for sleep mode when busy, but worked on battery power alone at the lowest energy configuration and after about 2 hours only used 25% of the battery life. And Domino was still running processes for me in the background.

So the answer from me is go get it and have fun!
Or if you are in the US, or don't mind a US keyboard I should say, I have a deal for you coming out in a day or 2 which you might appreciate.