That Didn't Last Long....

I wrote only a few days ago how I had upgraded to a spiffy new HP laptop running Windows 7 with all kinds of media facilities. It's a lovely little machine, but had one problem: I couldn't get e-mail to work on it. Not my legacy Eudora running in compatibility mode, not the beta test version of Eudora for Windows 7, not Mozilla Thunderbird, not even the Windows Live Mail that had been pre-installed on the machine. All failed, in one way or another, to connect to my ISP -- they could neither download e-mail ("connection timed out" -- "connection refused" -- "connection closed by foreign host") nor send it ("550 relay not permitted" -- "application refused (10061)" -- "RCTP rejected"). (Although, interestingly, I could connect to the web using Mozilla Firefox, using exactly the same settings as on my old desktop machine -- as I was attempting to use the settings from the dekstop PC for e-mail.) On the advice of the vendors, I downloaded a utility (Norton Removal Tool) to remove a pre-installed antivirus program which might have been gumming up the works; but this was of no avail. I couldn't even use Windows' system restore facility to return the machine to an earlier state (before I tried to install any e-mail application and might have buggered the underlying settings): that repeatedly closed without completing because "an application such as anti-virus might be running -- please disable the anti-virus and try again". That a basic Windows utility such as that didn't work suggested fairly strongly that the chief source of the problems was the machine itself.

So I finally gave up. I removed from the laptop everything I'd put on it -- music, photographs, desktop images, spreadsheets, other documents, the web-editing and other applications -- and returned it for a refund. That took a little bit of argument, since of course any vendor is reluctant to cancel a sale, but the fact that the thing couldn't be brought up to full functionality and was therefore No Damn Use was in the end fairly unanswerable.

So now I'm back to my old, slow desktop PC running Windows XP on a five or six-year-old processor and less than a Gb of RAM, with no fancy media facilities. On the other hand, it does have a TFT screen and wireless broadband, and it does everything for which I actually use a computer -- especially the sending and receiving of e-mail. Given the struggles I had getting the laptop to do something as apparently simple as that, I think it will be many more years before I again contemplate replacing my PC.