Hewlett Packard - Why do I keep giving them money?

Our plan for around this Christmas was to build a couple of nice desktops, since we’ll be living in the one place for at least a year and my laptop is already starting to show it’s age in terms of gaming performance.

Sabriena mentioned how Duncan spent most of his time playing or watching TV in the living room, and how the desktop was at the other end of the house and she just out of curiosity decided to look at laptops. We took a look and found an i7+GeForce laptop on sale, in town, and for a rather deep discount ($300).

I effectively took the decision out of her hands, since she’d probably umm and ahh over it until the sale ended. In to town to take a look, and they’re advertising it at $200 off. We had brought along a print out of the ad, and asked if they’d price-match what was advertised online - a quick consult with the manager and we had the green light.

It’s got a GeForce 840m, which funny enough doesn’t seem to perform quite as well as my 750m. It also only has a dual-core i7, whereas I have four physical cores. Oddly enough, thanks to the falling Aussie dollar, it was about the same price as mine was a year ago.

But the real kick in the nuts is the terrible disk performance. Hewlett Packard, why do I keep giving you money? They install everything including the kitchen sink, and the anti-virus software on a brand new machine (first boot, ever) decided to do a full scan rendering the entire machine incredibly painful to use until I killed off the process.

After uninstalling a bunch of trash, installing decent AV software, and tweaking a few things, it’s mostly acceptable. It still chokes a bit periodically however.

Looks like we’ll have to try and find an untouched 8.1 install media and see if SLIC will do it’s thing the way it did on mine. There might also be an SSD in her future as well.

Horsham VIC 3400, Australia

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Horsham VIC 3400, Australia

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