Last Christmas, as a gift to myself, I decided to buy an HP Mini 110. As I sink deeper into blogging I felt that I needed something ultra-portable to carry everywhere. Though my old and trusty Mac still works perfectly, I find that it’s a tad heavy compared to the usual netbook flooding the market today.

I did a little research on what would be the best netbook to buy, but in the end I decided to go for the HP Mini because of one distinguishing factor, the keyboard. If you take a look at the Mini you will notice that its keyboard is similar to that of a full-sized laptop. This is very important for me because I need to come up with a lot of articles week after week after week. And although the other netbooks boast of better features, I just really need something that has decent enough speed and RAM plus the standard 1.66Gb of processing speed. How much do you really need for word processing and facebook anyway?

The HP Mini was gorgeous when I first beheld it! I couldn’t wait for the lady to hand me the netbook so I can already connect it to SM Megamall’s wifi. Alas when you’re buying things in credit, you can’t really expect things to be superfast. Anyway, when I finally got my netbook, I was really hungry and wanted to go home.

After a quick bite, I tried out my apartment’s wifi connection on my new Mini. It worked perfectly! I can even work from downstairs where my living room is! I slept that night with a silly smile on my face. The following day however, the HP wouldn’t boot up. The freaking system has crashed! A required DLL library cannot be found it says.

Unfortunately for me, I was on my way to my province when it happened so I couldn’t bring it back to Sillicon Valley to be fixed.

Fast forward 10 days after when I got back from the holidays, I was asking Sillicon Valley’s security guard who I should approach regarding repairs of a defective unit. The guard pointed me to compuserve, which was across Sillicon Valley. I pleaded my case before the all-powerful technicians of this warranty service shop but all I got was “Sir, that’s a software problem so that’s not covered by the warranty.”

After explaining that I only used it for a day, they finally said that they will reinstall the software and will only charge me for the labor cost. I asked how much, they said P1250. WTF!? That much to install a frigging software? I get a defective software bundled with the HP Mini, and when the software conks out after a day, I get charged an additional P1250. Wow, that’s quite a cutthroat deal.

I almost shouted at the technician when I told him to pack everything and give me my notebook. There was no way in hell that I’m gonna pay that much to have my software re-installed? CompuServe? Seriously? Almost any moron including this one can install a windows OS blindfolded these days and youre charging me that much? Talk about highway robbery if ever there was one.

I huffed and puffed towards Sillicon Valley and asked to talk to their manager. Fortunately I saw the technician who prepped my HP Mini and immediately told her what happened. She also mentioned software is not covered by the warranty but she said the amount they’re asking is too much. I think she saw how vexed I was because she called another technician and asked him to take a look at my notebook and try to do a recovery.

After a long while, it looked like my hard disk needs reformatting because they couldn’t fix it anymore. I told the guy not to worry about, I’ll just buy an external DVD player and I’ll just take it from there.

And that’s the story behind the resurrection of the HP Mini. For sure we didn’t start in the best of terms but I kinda feel that we’re gonna be very good friends. As for that blasted CompuServe office, man those guys are pirates. I still can’t get over the fact that they would charge me that much for such an easy job. Oh well, good luck with that.

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