Bad Luck In Redlands,CA (With A Happy Ending)

I'm currently in Redlands,CA conducting a 4 day Training Seminar. I brought my Dell M6300 laptop to use for demonstrations. At the end of day 1, I returned to my hotel room with the usual list of topics to research and questions to answer for tomorrow's day 2 session.

So, I fire up my 5 month old Dell M6300 and begin to answer a few e-mails and that's when the fur hit the fan. My computer just stopped, no warning, just a black, blank screen. Uh Oh...Now this wasn't good at all.

I took a few deep breaths and tried to restart the laptop, nothing...When I pushed the Power Button the system fans would come on but the Hard Drive light did not come on at all. Ummm...I held the laptop up to my ear, the hard drive wasn't spinning! Bummer!

Now what? I'm 112 miles from home, it's 6:00pm, and I'm in a town I've never been to before. I can't get on the Internet to look for advice or help. I can't call Dell because all the pertinent information about the machine is filed neatly in my office file cabinet.

Then, I remembered I saw a WalMart a few blocks from my hotel. I've never purchased a computer from "Wally World (WalMart)" Have you? So I head on over and look over the selections. They had 4 machines displayed ranging in price from $548.00 - $898.00. They all had Vista Home Premium, and AMD processors...Bummer times 2!

Being the cheapskate that I am, I settled on the $598.00 HP Pavilion DV6000. On the drive back to my hotel room, I kept thinking "I'm probably out of luck because Vista Home Premium is not supported for SolidWorks nor PDMW Enterprise." But, I had to try and make it work. I couldn't consider canceling.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised when I found I could indeed install SQL Server 2005, 2008 PDMW Enterprise and 2008 SolidWorks Office Professional. Thank goodness I packed my disks.

The day 2 Training session went without a hitch, everything worked and the customer got and will continue to get their training. Great!

A $598.00 SolidWorks machine, interesting...

Cheers,
Devon T. Sowell
http://www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

*** You get what you pay for. Here is the Rebuild time of Anna Woods' Punch Holder part, a measly 233 seconds. Compare that to the Dell M6300 time of 111 seconds.

Comments

[Devon T. Sowell]

Hi Craig-

Send me an e-mail at dtsowell@3-ddesignsolutions.com

Devon

[Craig]

Hey there, I have been trying to get SolidWorks to run on my Vista machine and am wondering if you knew any tricks that made it so easy for you on this trip. Any help is hugely appreciated.

[Devon T. Sowell]

Hi Jules-

No, not yet. I'm buried in work, I'll call them tomorrow and then wait for a RMA so I can send it back.

Devon

[Jules]

Did you ever find what was wrong with your Dell lappy? I suspect a fried muther effer board or a dead hard drive.