I was so excited...

My big beautiful workhorse of a laptop has been having some pretty major issues lately, and since my work depends a fair deal on a dependable system I figured I may as well take advantage of the holiday sales going on.  Found a great deal on a new HP Pavilion DV7-1177; 17″, P5400 Centrino Duo, 4Gb RAM, 64-bit Vista (don’t start with me, I don’t have a real choice in my industry… yet…).  I was all ready to spend a couple hours last night downloading, configuring, tweaking, etc., but as soon as the first “Welcome” screen popped up… there they were.  A big ugly blotch of dead pixels.  Not frozen, not stuck, dead.  Like someone stabbed the screen with a chopstick.

Thankfully, Staples has a relatively aceptable return policy.  No more of that particular model, of course, but they do have a DV7-1174… almost identical, close enough for me.  Here’s hoping second time’s a charm.