One month and a day after my laptop died on me it returned from the land of the dead bits and bytes (Norwegian PC repair company Infocare). In my first post I said that I had asked HP for a repair under Norwegian consumer laws 5 year warranty. Not that easy. Since I bought the dv9074ea from Komplett.no I had to take matters to them…

So off to the phones… explaining my predicaments… logging a 5 year warranty reclaim on their website… getting a initial positive response and sending the very dead laptop off to Komplett. After verifying that my story was true, they then sent the machine off to Infocare which then repaired it by installing a new motherboard, replacing the DVD drive and updating the BIOS before promptly returning the machine to yours truly. At what cost to me? Nil, nada, nothing!

There are some horror stories of bad customer care at Komplett going around Norwegian forums, but I have nothing but praise for them. They have been very forthcoming and since I am writing this on my repaired and returned laptop I am a very satisfied customer. That’s the way it should be, and it sure guaranties that I will return as a customer.

So my Laptop Hunt ended me up where I was in the beginning; with my HP dv9074ea, a laptop that is soon 3 years old – aging would be a gentle way of putting it in the chronicles of PC life expectancy and relevance – BUT it not only runs Windows 7 RC well, it does so beautifully. I have been to some PC retail stores lately, checking out their offers and I have not seen many machines there that has a better Windows Experience Index score than mine…

So that’s it. A happy ending to something I thought would be something completely different.

There has been a lot of controversy over Microsoft’s latest commercial. The Apple fan boys have been particularly loud, making fun of the “fact” that Microsoft caters to losers and that the PC she chose was a piece of …

Ed Bott has posted an excellent article on his blog ridiculing their arguments. And he does it in his typical meticulous and thorough manner. Enjoyable read indeed. Here are some highlights;

Yes, that’s right. Using Weintraub’s impeccable analysis, if you paid $2800 for a MacBook Pro last December, you are a complete loser and you should probably remove those inferior DDR2 memory chips it came with, hone them to a sharp edge, and slash your wrists with them. Or donate that useless four-month-old piece of crap to charity or sell it on eBay and replace it with a new MacBook Pro with DDR3 RAM for (cough) another $2800.

…

Why do Apple fanboys have such a hard time acknowledging that Apple hardware really does cost more than similarly configured PC alternatives?

But don’t take my word for it, go to his blog and check it out for yourself!

Yesterday Microsoft launched a new series of ads in their ongoing Windows Brand Campaign; Laptop Hunters. In this first ad and supposedly in the follow ups they are following real people on their quest to find a new laptop.

I thought this first video was just great. It certainly hints at the so-called Apple Tax or Premium, and shows how much more choice there is in the Windows world. To be clear; I think that Apple makes great hardware products, but at the same time find them too expensive and limiting (think upgrades). Anyway; Here is the first ad. What do you think?

Laptop Hunters #1 – Lauren