Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.

In a recent Network World article IT Managers are warned against buying consumer class laptops. The logic implied is that higher prices mean better quality systems. Unfortunately my experience shows that paying more money by no means guarantees that you will get better systems.

In October 2007 I purchased four HP Compaq 8510p systems for evaluation for evaluation purposes, and supplied them to several end users, one of who was our corporate lawyer. Right from the beginning these systems had problems, with the ATI graphics card resetting and with the wireless cards taking over 15 minutes to connect.

Then things went downhill . Our corporate lawyer, who uses only MS Office, had blue screens every day with "infinite loop" error messages from the graphics card driver. (A little web research show that some ATI cards have suffered from Infinite loop errors for over 3 years). A driver update did nothing. HP sent a replacement for the corporate lawyers system. Within a few days the replacement system started blue screening. At the same time my laptop's graphics card started resetting occasionally. So HP sent two more replacement machines. When the first machine would not even boot, saying that the BIOS was not ACPI compliant things didn't look good. Sure enough, our corporate lawyer's machine started blue screening again, with increasing frequency. Eventually she gave it back to me, saying that it was useless. Another user has SAS on their machine. This one green screened – a first for me! (It looked like it went into character mode, showing rows of little green boxes).

With our Sox project taking up much of my time I just haven't been able to get these problems resolved. But apart from that, you really don't expect new laptops that cost about $2200 each to suffer from these problems. Out of 4 machines supplied every single one has a graphics card problem, and at least two of them have wireless problems. Including the replacement machines, the failure rate is over 100%! I am still struggling to get HP to resolve these problems.

Needless to say, we won't be buying any more HP laptops, which is a pity because I really liked them. While this experience can't be typical (if it was, I would expect HP to be out of the laptop business) it does show that paying more for laptops by no means guarantees that you will have fewer problems. If anything, considering the volumes sold, maybe it would pay IT manager to buy consumer class laptops.

Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.

Missing Keystrokes Problem

Recently I was working in my home office when my wireless keyboard started playing up and dropping random keystrokes. The wireless mouse on the other hand worked perfectly. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is to check the strength of the keyboard battery. According to the Windows control panel it was good. Strange. Even checked them with a volt meter (one of the benefits of being trained as an electrical engineer) - the battery was good.

Must be a faulty transmitter in the keyboard. So I bought another of the identical model. Strange - the problem was still there. Tried different combinations of new and old keyboards and receiver units - they all behaved the same way; and each time the mouse worked fine. What was even stranger was when I moved the receiver closer to the keyboard, all keyboards worked perfectly. Again, behavior was identical with the new and existing keyboards.

The I noticed my cordless phone on my desk had moved to within a few inches of the original site of the keyboard / mouse receiver unit. Even though they were operating on different frequencies, the output from the phone was strong enough to sometime scramble signals from the keyboard. I also realized it was doing the same thing to the mouse, but that was masked by the fact that you don't notice a small amount of dropped data from the mouse. All it means is the mouse sensitivity goes down slightly (i.e. you must move it further than before for the same on screen effect.)

To solve the problem, I moved the cordless phone back to it's original location, and everything worked fine. Didn't even need the new keyboard. Like many problems, this one is so obvious when it is explained, but can be quite difficult to resolve. I shared it in the hope that somebody else can avoid the same pain.

By the way, if you use a wireless keyboard, you need to be aware of the security risk. It is possible for someone with sensitive equipment to pick up the signals from some distance away. Potentially they could grab your passwords off the air. I have no idea of the encryption used on the link between the keyboard and receiver unit, but doubt that it is "industrial strength". If somebody has the equipment to get the signals, they probably have the skill to crack the encryption. Just be aware of this risk. It may be enough to make you decide to go back to a wired keyboard.