Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

It has been three months. Three months of annoyance, three months of waiting to hear something – and inevitably hearing nothing. And now I have decided to never buy an HP laptop ever again.

I suppose I should have looked into it a little more before I bought my most recent one. There are complaints over the net that they tend to need repairing a lot.

But I was lured in by a very fancy thing with a swivelling screen that can make it form a sort of tablet computer, looked nice. It felt nice, and it even worked very well – while it was under warranty, that is.

But then, almost as soon as the warranty expired, it broke. Inevitable, I guess. The screen went black, and I couldn’t do anything. So I turned it off, and then it never properly turned back on again. It hummed a little, and the lights came on, but the screen never did.

So I got it fixed, and everything was fine again for a month or so. But then it broke again: exactly the same way as it had done before.

Now, I’ve waited three months for them to repair it. At first, they were just being slow. Then they said they needed to fly in a chip from China – and then the volcanic ash cloud stopped that from coming for a while. And when they did finally get the chip, it didn’t do anything. After three months, they have told me it will need a new motherboard, and that is rather expensive.

So I suppose I’ll just have to see if I can get the hard drive turned into an external HDD. And start looking for a new computer. I’ve been so long without it that I can’t even remember if there’s anything worth keeping on there.

But I do know this: I’m not going to be getting an HP again.