My Laptop-y Escapades

Seems I just have bad luck with laptops. I ended up returning my Lenovo Y560 because of a. obscene overheating and b. a strange glitch wherein the cursor would randomly become 3 or 4 times larger than usual for a few minutes, every so often. I replaced it with an HP ENVY 15, which arrived a couple days ago, and was so excited that I decided to document the unboxing process with photos:

HP paid serious attention to detail with the packaging of the ENVY series. The box feels quite heavy duty and I'm definitely going to save it for something else. (On an irrelevant note, those are push-up bars in the background)

Open the box up, and there's the laptop, in a nice sleeve. Underneath the Getting Started pamphlet on the right is the laptop manual, stored on a 2GB SD card.

The laptop out of the box, still in sleeve. The sleeve is pretty soft and I'll probably continue to use it to protect the laptop from scratching and such.

Laptop, out-of-sleeve. There's a subtle floral-esque pattern of dots, which HP says was laser-etched onto the cover. The entire laptop is made of aluminum and magnesium (Fancy-sounding, I know) and feels well-built. It's also quite thin and light.

And here it is, opened. It has a 15.6" screen with a 1920x1080 resolution - for reference, my 21.5" monitor has the same resolution, meaning that text can be pretty small at the default zoom level. However, it's also extremely pretty. The laptop has a very Macbook Pro-esque aesthetic, which isn't necessarily bad - the usual glossy plastic starts to be annoying after a while. The island-style keyboard (similar to those on Macbook Pros) is quite nice to type on. It would have been nice if the laptop had a backlit keyboard, but I'm a touch-typist anyways. It has a large touchpad with integrated buttons, also similar to the Macbook, but it's not quite as nice to use. It'll probably take a bit of getting used to. One thing that does bother me is that the screen doesn't open more than about 100 degrees.

Now that that's done with, on to the problems. When I first started up the laptop, it told me that there was an error with the cooling fans, and proceeded to shut down. "Damn," I thought. After a few more tries, it finally started up successfully. However, it's been giving me the error message 90% of the time now, and I just noticed last night that the fan on the left side of the computer isn't working at all - Presumably, that's the source of the problem.

None of the 'solutions' on the HP website worked (They told me to "update" to the BIOS version already installed). So I finally gave up and contacted tech support for a repair. They're sending the shipping materials today and estimated a 7-9 day turnaround. Hopefully they can fulfill that estimate, since I'm going to need a computer come the beginning of school.

Ah, woe is me. Etcetera.