It's official, I hate HP now.

So get this. I have a T-mobile SDA, which is a Windows Mobile powered cellphone. I've had it for quite awhile. There's a reason why I have a Windows-based smartphone. You see, I got a Treo when the 600 first came out. I thought it was really cool and awesome. Then I got it and realized it was more than I needed. However, I loved how my contacts and calendar items are saved to Outlook on my computer. That was when I was running XP.

Then I switch phones, computers, homes, etc. I wound up with the SDA with an HP laptop running Vista. Vista does not allow you to install ActiveSync, which is the program that syncs your smartphones to Outlook. Fine, I have my contacts from a previous sync with my old computer. But it came time to switch phones, and I really need to sync once to get my data onto the computer. So anyhoot, after signing up for the gym, I figure out Friday night how to do it. Got all my contacts and data over onto my laptop, and now I'm a happy camper.

On Saturday, I get my new phone. It's a T-Mobile Dash (yes, another HTC phone. I like them). I'm pretty excited. It's a thin Blackberry styled phone with a QWERTY keyboard; no touchscreen, I don't like them from my bad experience with the Treo 600. I go home, pull up to my laptop and hit the power button. I hear the fan spin up, the harddrive initialize, the optical drive click...but then nothing. The screen remains dead and black. The bios does not initiate. NO WAY.

Here's a little background to my laptop. It's an HP Pavilion dv-2000 series. 14.1", dual-AMD chip. Pretty nice. I got it in October 2007. Fifteen days later the harddrive fails - click of death (Hitachi and IBM harddrives are known for this; mine was a Hitachi according to Best Buy). I managed to convince Best Buy to give me a replacement even though I was out of the 14-day return/exchange period (c'mon it was one day!). I've heard from techies that HP is bad, but I thought they were pretty nice. And the harddrive dying is not really HP's fault. So anyway, I get the replacement, download my backup from Carbonite (great great great backup service by the way. $49.99 for 1 year, and it's saved me a lot of headaches).

Eight months later, I'm here staring at a dead laptop. I'm suspecting it's the bios or chip, because it tries to boot up, but doesn't even turn on the screen. I've tried solutions I've found online, but nothing. Only thing I can hope for now is that HP will take it back and repair it since it's within one year. But let me tell you this: I will NEVER buy HP again. One laptop model. Two failures? In eight months??? Unacceptable. My friend's Dell of two years is running strong. I expect the same. My next laptop will NOT be an HP. It might be an isolated case (two cases for me), but lose your data (I know mine's backed up, but imagine it wasn't?) and your time waiting for your machine to be up and running again, and one isolated case is one too many.