I chose not to return the mini to thinkgeek.com for a full refund with the promise from HP technical support that they would send a replacement upgrade for my defective machine. Well, after almost a month it's finally here and I love it!! The old mini definitely had defective hardware as the new laptop's wifi hooked right up to the network.
The 24-48 hours shipping turned into almost a month but it was worth the wait. I called and raised a little stink about not seeing the replacement for almost a month and got a call back from a different tech. He said they weren't getting the 1.6Ghz machines with Suse for another week. Being way behind and in a hurry to g3et caught up on side work, I asked if he could just ship me one with Windows Vista and I would install Suse from the CD. He agreed and said it would ship the next day and he'd send a restore CD for Vista just because.
It arrived!!! I opened the box to find a shiny new laptop with Windows Vista, power cord and 6-cell battery! No CDs or manuals though so I called the original tech and got the Vista restore CD sent. I boxed up the old laptop and shipped it back. Working laptop in hand... Awesome!
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
HP mini-note 2133 update
Got the mini a day before the projected delivery date!
Go UPS!! :>
First boot was setup, reboot took a couple minutes as it was configuring things and third boot was nice and fast at about 1 minute or so. Suse Gnome interface is OK but I still like my Kubuntu KDE look-and-feel more.
First and last thing I tried to do was configure wireless. System saw the card and drivers are there but it wouldn't connect to wifi. I turned off all encryption on the router but it still wouldn't connect to open wifi either. :< Took it to work and had a linux guru mess with iwconfig and stuff trying to get it to connect to a WPA encrypted network with no luck.
Long story short, logged 6 tech support calls with HP and a new mini is on the way.
Long story long, First call: I asked about the wifi and tech said it is supported and should work under linux. Unfortunately HP decided to put in a Broadcom card which has NEVER played nice with linux. Then I asked about a recovery disk and they said they'd send it if I had any problems in the the first 90 days. I think not... made them send me the restore DVD and it got here in about 2 days. I left the call at that and took a couple days to play with the wireless settings.
Second call: a different tech just went through the wireless configuration over and over... :/ Finally said he'd find an actual mini to test. Apparently he was just walking through Suse wireless setup on a desktop. No call back so I called a Third time and was told they were working on it and would call back after the weekend.
Fourth call: was a bunch of the same unsuccessful wireless configuration over and over. He apparently had a mini connect to their open network with no problems. Gave me his direct number, which I thought was really nice, and asked me to call back the next day.
Fifth call: Only thing different to try was setup without actually entering the WEP key so it would prompt for one but no luck. Next he was gonna send me the DVD to re-install but I told him I already had it from my first call. The next day at work I got hold of an external DVD drive and re-installed twice but still no connection at work or home. Smart linux guru at work tried a Madriva live CD and finally gave up. We pretty much narrowed this down to a hardware problem at this point...
Sixth and final call: The tech finally gave up and looked up warranty return options. He offered a deal I couldn't refuse. Apparently they have a program called "capture58" where new hardware releases with problems are taken back to see what is wrong so product improvements can be made. They exchanged my 1.2Ghz, 1GB RAM, 120GB HD Suse OS configuration for a 1.6Ghz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD and supposedly Suse although this is the Windows Vista hardware configuration...
So I am anxiously awaiting the replacement and am curious if it will come with linux or Vista. I have the Suse recovery DVD and am seriously considering the Ubuntu install so Windows won't last long if it's actually on there...
Go UPS!! :>
First boot was setup, reboot took a couple minutes as it was configuring things and third boot was nice and fast at about 1 minute or so. Suse Gnome interface is OK but I still like my Kubuntu KDE look-and-feel more.
First and last thing I tried to do was configure wireless. System saw the card and drivers are there but it wouldn't connect to wifi. I turned off all encryption on the router but it still wouldn't connect to open wifi either. :< Took it to work and had a linux guru mess with iwconfig and stuff trying to get it to connect to a WPA encrypted network with no luck.
Long story short, logged 6 tech support calls with HP and a new mini is on the way.
Long story long, First call: I asked about the wifi and tech said it is supported and should work under linux. Unfortunately HP decided to put in a Broadcom card which has NEVER played nice with linux. Then I asked about a recovery disk and they said they'd send it if I had any problems in the the first 90 days. I think not... made them send me the restore DVD and it got here in about 2 days. I left the call at that and took a couple days to play with the wireless settings.
Second call: a different tech just went through the wireless configuration over and over... :/ Finally said he'd find an actual mini to test. Apparently he was just walking through Suse wireless setup on a desktop. No call back so I called a Third time and was told they were working on it and would call back after the weekend.
Fourth call: was a bunch of the same unsuccessful wireless configuration over and over. He apparently had a mini connect to their open network with no problems. Gave me his direct number, which I thought was really nice, and asked me to call back the next day.
Fifth call: Only thing different to try was setup without actually entering the WEP key so it would prompt for one but no luck. Next he was gonna send me the DVD to re-install but I told him I already had it from my first call. The next day at work I got hold of an external DVD drive and re-installed twice but still no connection at work or home. Smart linux guru at work tried a Madriva live CD and finally gave up. We pretty much narrowed this down to a hardware problem at this point...
Sixth and final call: The tech finally gave up and looked up warranty return options. He offered a deal I couldn't refuse. Apparently they have a program called "capture58" where new hardware releases with problems are taken back to see what is wrong so product improvements can be made. They exchanged my 1.2Ghz, 1GB RAM, 120GB HD Suse OS configuration for a 1.6Ghz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD and supposedly Suse although this is the Windows Vista hardware configuration...
So I am anxiously awaiting the replacement and am curious if it will come with linux or Vista. I have the Suse recovery DVD and am seriously considering the Ubuntu install so Windows won't last long if it's actually on there...
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