Fracking Computers

Photo: Kristi Evans

A little over a year ago my (not so) trusty HP dv4000 laptop crapped out.  Barely two years old, it was almost perfect and I had bought it for a song.  I mulled over just getting by with my desktop (which lives upstairs in my home office) and my “work” laptop which I prefer to not use for fun, not that anyone really seems to care.

I ended up getting a decent deal on a Lenovo R61i with Vista.  Nice laptop, although I am not a fan of widescreens but I do watch some movies on this machine and figured it would be good for that.  It took a couple of months to turn off and/or configure some of the more major Vista annoyances and for the past eight months I have been fighting just one…the S3 resume from standby takes from 30 to 60 seconds IF it comes back at all; mostly the problem appeared to be wireless related.  One out of ten or so times, the HDD light stays on and that’s it, switch off time.

I tried everything, updated BIOS a couple times, Lenovo’s (IBM legacy really) clunky System Update, Vista SP1, etc., etc.  Nothing helped.  Since the warranty is a couple weeks from expiring, I called Lenovo and attempted to whine my way into an XP downgrade DVD pleading that I had put up with it for 11.5 months.  After escalating to a supervisor, I pretty much had them talked into waving the $35 charge until they discovered that there was no DVD for this box nor was it even licensed by Microsoft for downgrade.  Sh*t.  I’ve been threatening just to overwrite their crappy preload with Ubuntu for months, but that would prevent my Netflix instant watching, at least half the reason for even owning this computer.

So…I made one last troll through Lenovo’s customer forums.  Several people had reported random Wifi disconnects and other symptoms that they had fixed by getting rid of the craptacular Access Connections (which is actually the only one of the Lenovo/IBM utils that I kinda like).  None of their symptoms correlated with mine, so I had not tried that.   Since I was out of options, I gave it a whirl two days ago.  BADDA BING, the dang thing has been perfect so far with no resume/reconnect taking longer than 5-6 seconds.

I’m obviously kicking myself for not trying it sooner, but pleased that it seems to be a fix…and keeping my fingers crossed that I didn’t just jinx it by writing this.