Why?

Equipment failure, particularly computer failure, is something inevitable, right on top with death and taxes. As the owner of a computer company, I was only too aware of that fact, and the cost of customer service. I've had my share of trying to figure out if the problem was hardware or software related.
In my time as a computer whore, I've assembled and disassembled computers (desktops and portables), installed, un-installed and troubleshooted Windows until I was blue in the face, spending hours swapping stiffy disks...

For a while now, I've had more pressing affairs than computer repairs, most of my machines run a flavour of Linux (mainly Ubuntu, thanks boets! ;-)
Software AND hardware have become more reliable, and I was quite happy to pay my money and have the problems solved by somebody else.

Until I decided to purchase a Toshiba computer.

The machine per-se isn't a fundamentally bad machine, it has a few extra that are absolutely useless for somebody on the move (try and get TV reception when you're not in the country where you purchased the computer), it is heavy (but I was not too worried about that, it sits on a desk most of the time, and I seldom have to actually carry it) and I really like its 18.4 inch screen. That's the feature I was looking for, really.

Right from purchase, I got a few blue screens, probably a couple of times per week. I ascribed that to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and happily installed Chrome. The frequency of blue screens seemed to diminish, so I put up with it, waiting for Windows 7 to come out. Of course, my purchase entitled me to a free upgrade (free, that is, "almost free": I had to pay for shipping expenses that would have been enough to ship a crate of computers half way around the planet).

It wasn't until the blue screens got really frequent that I decided to install 7. It got to the point where I could actually not restart the machine anymore. On a quiet Saturday morning, I set about to install the upgrade. First hurdle: the upgrade DVD is not bootable: you have to have a running machine to perform the upgrade. *ç%% I get the "rescue disks", and go through the couple of hours of disk swapping and file copying to get &%"* Vista installed again, the Toshiba drivers installed just so the upgrade could de-install them and replace them with the 7 versions.
Aside form the time it took, the process was painless enough.

First start was fine, and I was quite confident that the problems were resolved...
A couple of days later, I got my first blue screen, and from then on, the situation worsened. I contacted the warranty number I was given by my supplier, and had to send the computer in.
It came back a week later, with *)&ç% Vista installed, and a note saying that the only thing wrong was driver installation...
Not an hour later, I had my first blue screen. The technician reply to my question about that problem was "One simple bluescreen is never enough to say that there is a hardware-problem."
So I had to wait another day to accumulate enough evidence in the form of frustrating blue screens.

... to be continued