All your laptops are belong to Windows.

[Michael W. Oliver]

On 2005-02-15T01:06:58-0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

[ridiculous attribution from Outlook snipped]

> > The computer is a HP Pavilion zv5445us, with 512MB RAM, P4-3Ghz, 100GB
> > HD, 15.4" Hi-Def Screen, 54G 802.11b WLAN.  I purchased it
> > from Best Buy.

> Best Buy is fairly good at taking exchanges within 30 days.  Their
> written policy kind of threatens a restocking charge of 15% on opened
> notebook computers - but the exception is if the item is defective.
> In your case you have a grey area, but if you were to take it back and
> tell them that the system is periodically shutting itself down and you
> want to exchange it for a different model because you don't have any
> confidence in the zv5445us, they wouldn't be able to verify this and
> you could probably talk your way out of the restock charge,
> PARTICULARLY if you bought the item on a credit card - since credit
> card issuers generally take a dim view of restock fees on consumer
> items.  I have had a family member do this exact thing with a laptop
> he bought from there a few years ago.  (it wasn't a FreeBSD thing, the
> laptop was just not very well made and he ended up buying a more
> expensive laptop from them)  This is also particularly if you bring
> back ALL OF the original packing materials AND THE SOFTWARE
> particularly if it's unopened, and repack the laptop in it's box.
> Remember that Best Buy has to send the thing back to HP and if it
> breaks in transit and it wasn't in the factory cardboard, HP is going
> to charge Best Buy for the loss.

If you return it to Best Buy and decide to pick up another laptop, bring
a FreeSBIE disc with you, and maybe a Frenzy disc, to test the laptop
before you buy it.  I have done this a couple of times, and only once
did someone even ask me what I was doing, and when I started to explain,
their eyes glazed over and I just went back to testing.

I ended up buying a Sager 4750V from discountlaptops.com and have been
very happy, except for the first few days.  The firewire controller has
issues on this laptop, and 5.3-RELEASE puked when probing the fwohci.  I
used a Frenzy disc, which does NOT have firewire support in the kernel,
and was able to boot it fine, whereas FreeSBIE (and any GENERIC FreeBSD)
had firewire compiled into the install media kernel, causing me much
heartache.  If you are interested in more detail, check out...

http://michael.gargantuan.com/sager_4750v/

HTH, have a good day.

(I am not affiliated with discountlaptops.com, other than being a
satisfied customer)

-- 
Mike Oliver
[see complete headers for contact information]

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