Friday night in Columbia South Carolina, ex-law enforcement officer Ray Jackson lost his temper while trying to repair his girlfriend’s computer.
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After installing Windows Vista on the girlfriend’s 2 year old computer Jackson was trying to get some of her older programs to work with the new operating system. “He couldn’t get anything to work like it was supposed to”, said girlfriend Wanda White. “He just kept screaming at it and smacking the side of the computer”.
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White had heard enough cursing from her boyfriend and went next door to her friend’s apartment. After about 20 minutes White and her friend heard gun shots from the apartment where Jackson was working. ..... When she opened the door there sat Jackson with his pistol in his hand. He had just shot the computer 5 times and missed once. The miss had gone into the neighbors apartment and the bullet was lodged into their refrigerator.
He's not the only one:
Man Shoots Computer in Somerset County, NJ
Man Shoots Computer in Issaquah, Washington
Man Shoots Laptop in Lafayette, Colorado
I'm certainly considering it, but even as it would be extremely cathartic, it would void the warranty pretty seriously.
But for all of you considering the same (and I know there's a lot of you out there) remember this:
1. Have a safe backstop (i.e. one that bullets cannot travel through like a concrete or brick wall). You are 100% responsible for where those bullets may end up, and they can pass through a computer and on to who knows where. Remember your enemy is the computer not some innocent bystander on the other side of a thin interior wall somewhere. Don't miss and be careful, Mr. Ricochet is not your friend.2. It is much, much, better and safer for all concerned to do this at a shooting range, and there's less chance of you being arrested for firing a gun in city limits, reckless endangerment, or whatever other charge police can come up with to lock you up until you calm down.
3. Make sure it is your computer you are shooting, respect other's malfunctioning frustrating and worthless computer property.
4. The Lafayette shooter, in hanging the shot-up computer over the bar as a trophy had a stroke of pure genius, for that artistry alone the judge should let him off.
5. Save yourself the headache and don't get Vista (hard to do as they preload it on everything but its worth avoiding the trouble).
As you can guess, this gorram HP Vista 64 computer is still not working. Even after 4 destructive rebuilds it still will without warning fail to boot as it finds some kind of conflict, then it does a system restore and removes whatever programs I've installed and remains unstable.
I now know about half the technical support people in India, and I've finally made it to level two technical support after rebuilding this piece of crap 4 times.
Make no mistake, the Indian techs are very nice and they do try to be helpful, and for the average problem I'm sure they're fine, but they start out on script and it takes about 20 minutes each for them to read the service ticket case notes and for me to explain what is in the note and that I've been through this already. I've done 4 destructive rebuilds including rebuilding off completely new discs they shipped to me, and the problem still keeps recurring. I'm now an expert at rebuilding a Vista computer and getting it to the point that it will crash with elan. Funnily enough when i ask if they have an XP image that is compatible with this computer they say installing X on it would void the warranty -- Ha!.
I've now spent untold hours messing with this thing. I'm now trying to decide whether to return it to Costco completely or just ship the desktop box to HP and let them try redoing it. The problem of course is Costco no longer offers this same package with the nice big monitor and good hardware configuration it came with at this price (its been about 60 days of me messing around with tech support trying to get this to work) I have 30 days left to return it to Costco. And of course both Dell and HP and all other Costco computer vendors ship all their machines with Vista, and their better machines with Vista 64, so if its not some hardware conflict I'll probably see this again. Spit.
Given the amount of troubleshooting and rebuilding, I'm seriously considering wasting more time and money and just building a computer from scratch. At least I'll be troubleshooting my own mistakes rather than Vista and HPs. When I spend extra and buy a computer from a manufacturer I do expect it to work and be stable, not to be a beta tester and constantly rebuilding the operating system.
