According to WindowsSecrets.com, tens of thousands of people have purchased notebooks with defective Nvidia chips. The chips overheated, which damaged the motherboards. Apple offered to repair or replace the motherboards, but HP and Dell did not.

From the site:

“What’s particularly scandalous, though, is how HP and Dell first handled the deluge of complaints from customers with notebooks that failed after their warranties expired. The companies either charged the customers (victims?) for repairs or refused service because the systems were past the warranty period.

“Even worse, HP and Dell continued to sell notebooks with the same Nvidia chip long after the companies were aware of the problem. (Ultimately, Nvidia released a new version of the GPU that didn’t cause overheating.)

“Unlike Dell and HP, Apple quickly acknowledged the presence of the defective Nvidia chip in some MacBook Pro notebooks and offered repairs or replacements to its customers.”

When the pressure on HP and Dell got too strong to resist, what did they do? Did they issue a recall? Did they offer to replace the defective motherboards? Nope, nope, they simply sent out a BIOS upgrade which caused the fan to run continuously, in order to cool off the Nvidia chip a little better. This served to extend the time before motherboard failure, while increasing the noise level and using up battery power.

You can read the full story, which has tips on how to get satisfaction to protect your investment, at the WindowsSecrets website.

I asked him what was so important on the internet, and he said he wanted to “tweet” to his friends.

Then, unrelated, a lady said she didn’t like her room because she couldn’t find a plug (outlet) close to the bed. Why is that important? Because, she explained, she likes to tweet until she falls asleep.

We’ve got some beautiful woods and meadows here, but will all our guests soon by lying in their beds tweeting all the time?

When someone at the bar asked him where he was from, he proudly said “Char-Lanta.” Well, the guy doing the asking didn’t know where that was, and Mr. Geek told him he was dumb for not knowing about the Raleigh-Durham / Charlotte / Atlanta mega-region corridor.

Fortunately, this did not lead to any fighting…but it could have. We all breathed a sigh of relief when Mr. Geek left the next morning.

He asked if we knew that Carbonite does not back up videos. I said I didn’t know that, and wasn’t sure I believed it.

So, he said “Go to your computer and double click the “Carbonite Backup Drive” icon on the desktop. Open the “Backed Up Files” folder and look for one of your videos. I went to a DVD folder that contains an old converted home video. Inside were two folders, VIDEO_RM and VIDEO_TS. The TS folder was very small, less than 1 MB.

He said, “Did you tell Carbonite to backup all your videos?” “Yes,” I replied, “months ago I selected the My Videos folder on my computer and selected the Backup option in Carbonite.”

“Now, look at that same VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive.” I did, and it was 4 GB! Carbonite had backed up the folder, but very little of what was inside it!

This was a big surprise, a very big surprise! I thought everything was safely stored offsite, but it wasn’t.

He said he thinks it’s possible to get Carbonite to back up videos, but that it takes a lot of manual configuring. Neither quick nor intuitive.

I’m not sure where we go from here, I guess I need to send those DVDs to my aunt in New Jersey for safekeeping.

My best advice was to get a printer that can do what you need to have done. Since there are likely to be several models that meet the criteria, I also use this tie-breaker:

Are toner refill kits for the proposed printer available on eBay or can you buy them on eCrater? They way I see it, if you can buy a refill kit it’s like you are making money by not paying lots of cash for the overpriced ones the manufacturers sell.

If they’re not available, don’t buy it!