Laptop Back Yeah!!!

OK, I just got my laptop back from repair. Thankfully I had an extended warranty from Costco. It took over a week to get back, but I did not have to pay for the replacement of two hard drives and the motherboard. I can handle a week of no PC for several hundred dollars.

I was fairly happy this time, but the last time it was horrible. Costco sent it to Micro Medics. They were awful. I am a network engineer that manages servers, I know what I am talking about. They were to replace the motherboard (video chipset) and one hard drive. The laptop has two and they knew that. They were told by Costco all of the problems from the ticket system that they share. This is what they ended up doing.

The replaced the motherboard fairly easily. The thing is a mess to get out so I will give them some slack for that. However, that is where they stopped. They then installed the OS (Vista Home Basic 32-bit) onto the 64-bit system that has Vista Ultimate. I sent them the system recovery disk for the to use. They did not even complete the restart and powered down by pressing the power button after the first load. When I started the PC I saw the Windows is starting for the first time message. This is really bad thing to see on a repair. If they did not run through the load and test functionality they should probably be fired.

Costco called me back as I was determining how bad Micro Medics was, and they had Micro Medics send me a UPS shipping label. Micro Medics were not able to copy and paste my email address out of the ticket system, so they sat for three days on this. Costco was the one to get me a new box shipped. Micro Medics used standard ground on it.

Once I sent it back, they took over a week to work on this. I got it back with a new hard drive, but the OS was still Vista Home Basic 32-bit. The second hard drive was not even added to the computer using the disk management snap in. At least I was able to fix everything myself. A grandmother would have sent it back a third time. Micro Medics sucks a lot.

If you ever have to send anything into Costco to get repaired under warranty, ask them to send it to another vendor than Micro Medics. They have several that they use.

Starting Post

OK, I am starting this blog, just to rant and complain about standard stupid things. The main reason is to get my Castle Falkenstein Role Playing game some higher page ranking on the good ole' Google.

I am just trying to get higher on the search for "Castle Falkenstein alternative rules". It does not even show in the regular search for "Castle Falkenstein". With the blog I can discuss our attempts to game and what ever may strike me. Pretty sad and pathetic is it not?

My search for Falkenstein stuff was frustrated when a lot of the archived material was removed from a HDD when I sent in a lap top to be repaired. Fancy HP gaming lap top with 2 hard drives. The techs did not understand that HDD1 is the second hard drive, with HDD0 being the first. They then reloaded the OS on top of HDD1, noticed that it was not correct half way through and reloaded 32-bit Vista on a 64-bit processor.

I used a fancy undelete program at work to recover most of the information, but my anime in MKV and OGG was a loss along with some of my Castle Falkenstein stuff. I will be avoiding Mico Medics from now on.

Now I will start to back up to the web with the Castle Falkenstein web site. Please take a look at it. I would like to see Castle Falkenstein prosper even if the publishers only have an electronic copy available.

Check out the R. Talsorian CF website. They have to be good they have an Anime Mecha.