A Plea to the Laptop Gods

I love my laptop. It was only cheap (£399) but it now has become the centre of my working world and out of work entertainment (non-alcoholic entertainment that is) world.

For those who care it’s an HP G60-214EM with some sort of fast dual-core AMD Athlon X2 processor, decent (for a cheap laptop) nVidia graphics, 160Gb hard drive and (for my VM obsession) 3Gb of RAM. The native Windows Vista Home Premium only lets it down a bit. The 15.4″ widescreen brightview (or whatever the HP term for that is) screen is very nice for watching all manner of DVDs etc if not a little fingerprint-prone.

Even the battery life isn’t too bad – anywhere from one to two hours dependent on the “power profile” you have chosen and precisely how much donkey pron you’re burning via the DVD-RW.

But recently it has developed a small foible – not charging the battery.

Works fine on the battery but when it’s then plugged in the mains/charge light either doesn’t come on (as it should when charging) or flashes as if it was in sleep mode. Windows helpfully reports the power “on mains, battery xx% (not charging)”.

Usually a little jiggery and powering off, leaving to cool down and general prayer/human sacrifice seems to resolve the problem. A brief googling shows many dells with similar problems and… horror of horrors… faulty hardware.

Faulty hardware on a UK model laptop in deepest darkest Namibia where parcels of much-less-enticing things cost a fortune to send and disappear without trace from the postal service is not a good thing.

So… please laptop Gods; have pity on me and make the problem go away like it has today.

I will sacrifice as many desktop machines (evil fixed-working-positions servants of Satan) or humans as required just let me keep my Family Guy and Friday Night Comedy podcasts… please.