RIP HP Digital Entertainment Center

Well, it was a good ride while it lasted. Last night my HP z545 Media Center died. May it rest in pieces. I'm not sure what happened to it, but when I came home from work it was dead. It won't boot, won't play, it won't even post. I spent a good hour on the phone with HP support only to be told that the error that was occurring could not occur on this model. They want me to ship it to them and have promised to have it back to me within 2-3 weeks. Overall I must say I'm pretty disappointed - when I spend nearly $2k on a piece of equipment and it fails less than a month later I would expect some form of remuneration - instead I get a kick in the pants and half a month without any form of digital entertainment in my house.

To add insult to injury yesterday my Media Center Extender arrived in the mail and I was quite excited to go hook it up and have the media center experience in my bedroom as well. Now I get a nice shiny piece of equipment to sit around in my bedroom and loom at me for the next 2 weeks, laughing at my inability to use it.

Aside from that today has been a fairly mundane day. I'm getting ready for the first of two work Christmas parties this evening. Tonight it's the smaller of the two events, so if I'm lucky I should be home by 9:00 or so. I really hate these stuffy events and wish that I could just stay home with Skype rather than go. *sigh* the things we do for our careers.

Comments

[Eric G. Harrison]

Hey, I feel your pain. When we got our HP media center pc, it died within two weeks. It took CompUSA a month to fix it.

Fortunately, it hasn't had to go to the shop since we got it back over a year ago.

The MCE 2005 upgrade made quite a nice difference (which I'll be blogging about shortly). You're lucky you didn't have to deal with the previous version!

We're using our Media Center Extender (HP X5400) in the bedroom, and it works pretty well. We're running it over 802.11G, and sometimes it will get flaky network performance. If only I had thought to run a network cable to that wall!

Good luck on the repair! - Eric.

[jake]

why am i not suprised?

Your site is very good.

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