HP Malaysia Warranty Service Feedback

Credit should be given where its due, and HP Malaysia’s customer service deserve some from my recent encounter with them. The personnels at HP Malaysia’s main office (HP Tower, Damansara) were well-mannered, friendly and helpful, but more importantly my laptop was repaired (under warranty) in 2 working days.

My recently purchased CQ45 laptop (Reviewed Here) had some problem with the LAN network port, and was found to be faulty or not functioning at optimum level. It’s supposed to be a GigaLAN network, but only manage to operate at 10mbps even on a 100mbps (or 1Gbps) network. The HP personnel at the service centre verified the problem, and eventually replaced a the laptop’s motherboard for free (under warranty). Althought they’ve quoted 3 working days to get it done, it was ready for collection in 2 working days.

I’ve had good encounter with Dell’s customer service previously too, it’s good and fixed at my doorstep within 3 working days from the day the problem was identified via a phone call to Dell customer service. Although HP does not offer such doorstep services, dropping by their service centre to get it fixed in a timely manner deserved to be given some credit as well.

Perhaps HP can further improve their customer service to on-the-spot repair in the future instead of having their customers to make 2 trips to the service centre (since they do not offer repair services at my doorstep)… Anyway, thumbs up to HP Malaysia’s Customer Service :)

NOTE: I’ve received several inquiries & questions with regards to HP Customer Service and Warranty. Unfortunately I’m NOT a HP representative nor do I work for HP to give any specific technical support or HP policies beyond my knowledge. Please contact HP Malaysia 1-800-88-8588 (within Malaysia only) or HP Malaysia website.

January 7th, 2009 in General, Hardware | 11 Comments

Goodbye 2008

It feels like I’ve just welcomed the dawn of 2008, but a year has past and 2008 is coming to an end. Many things have occurred in my life over this one year period which I didn’t quite have the time to blog about. So perhaps I shall sum it all up in my year-end reflection for 2008.

Well, what’s reflection without looking back at my 2008 resolutions which I’ve made early in the year?

  • Climb Mount Kinabalu
      • Checked! I’ve successfully conquered Mount Kinabalu this year as part of my “Cuti-cuti Malaysia” destination which I’ve always wanted to achieve before I turn 30. Glad I’ve made the trip, it was a fantastic climb
  • Get A New/Better Job
      • Checked! Well things has been going down hill in my previously job, it became just my job instead of my career. In this time of economy downturn, it was a tough decision to quit my job without securing a new offer. Anyway, I’m glad that I did manage to secure a job shortly after taking a break from work
  • Freelance Work
      • Checked! Freelance work is one of my resolutions as a stepping stone towards establishing my own company some day hopefully (fingers crossed). I’m glad there were a few freelance work that came knocking on my door this year, and it gave me some very valuable experience and an opportunity to build my reputation from here (besides the side income)
  • Blog More
      • Did I? In terms of blog post count, I have definitely not been blogging more. However, I believe my post are now better in terms of the content. Several post has made it into Google’s Top 10 search result for certain keywords, and has been generating good traffic. With many other commitments in life, perhaps occasional post of things that matters is better than simply blogging for the sake of blogging

Wow! 3 out of 4 resolutions… looks like it’s been quite a good 2008. I’ll keep 2009 resolutions for another post later when I’ve made some up.

Last but not least, (although it isn’t exactly a resolution) 2008 leads me to my other half. My first girlfriend and hopefully the one that I could share the rest of my life with. It’s been an exciting and interesting first-time experience into a relationship. May our love takes us through the ups and downs in life…

Goodbye 2008…

December 31st, 2008 in General | No Comments

Review: Compaq CQ45-127TX

Compaq has always been the value segment brand of HP’s product line. The new stylish Compaq Presario CQ45 series shares many similarity (in a good way) with the higher-end HP Pavillion dv4 series but with a smaller price tag. The Compaq CQ45-127TX is based upon Intel’s latest Montevina Centrino 2 platform.

Specifications (out-of-the-box)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 processor (2.26GHz/1066MHz FSB/3MB L2 Cache)
  • 1GB DDR2-667 RAM
  • 160GB (5400rpm) HDD
  • Intel Wireless Link 5100 (802.11 a/b/g/n) + Bluetooth
  • 14.1″ WXGA Brightview widescreen display
  • nVidia GeForce 9200M GS 256MB DDR2
  • 8x Multi-DVDRW with Lightscribe
  • Fingerprint reader
  • 6-cell Li-ion battery
  • Freedos (Compaq CQ45-128TX comes preloaded with Windows Vista)

Specifications (test unit)
The basic out-of-the-box specifications is rather under powered to run Windows Vista smoothly despite having one of the latest Intel processor and platform (1GB of RAM will sufficate Vista). Thus, I added more juice (RAM) to it to be able to run Windows Vista smoothly.

Similar to the above (obviously), the test unit has the following specifications

  • Additional 2GB DDR2-667 RAM making it 3GB of RAM in total.
  • Windows Vista Home Premiun – SP1

Design & Build Quality

The new Compaq CQ45 now spots a black glossy finnishing on the lid with Compaq’s ‘Q’ trademark at the center of it. It looks sleek and modern but it’s also a magnet for finger prints and stains. The palmrest and touch pad surface share a metallic silver (HP call’s it “liquid metallic”?) finishing with some circle patterns imprints to give it a touch of class like the HP Pavillion dv series laptop. Althought it looks nice, I’m not too keen of having the touch pad surface being as polished as this, it can be rather sticky to scroll when our fingers are not very dry.

The touch sensitive media buttons (launch media, wifi/bluetooth, mute, increase/decrease volume) has a nice combination of LED colors. E.g. wireless on – blue, wireless off – orange, volume on – white, volume off – orange. The status indicators (power, charging, hard disk activity) uses a nice cool white LED at the lower left corner of the palmrest which is visible even with the lid closed.

As one would expect from a value segment laptop, the Compaq CQ45 is made up of mostly plastic. It is of good quality plastic that is rigid and barely flexes which does give it a fairly durable feel. Overall, the build quality of the laptop is good and at an acceptable weight for a laptop of this class, 2.4kg.

Screen
The 14.1″ WXGA (1280×800) HP Brightview LCD screen delivers bright and vivid colors with a rather wide horizontal viewing angle. However, depending on the lighting condition of the surroundings, the glossy screen surface might be a little too reflective at times.

Keyboard & Touchpad
I’ve always enjoyed typing on HP’s (and also Dell’s) laptop keyboard, and I’m glad that this Compaq laptop inherits all the characteristic that makes a good keyboard. It’s well spaced, well sized keys, good tactile feel, and doesn’t flex. In fact, this review was typed entirely on it.

However, the touchpad didn’t quite excel as well as the keyboard. As mentioned earlier, I’m not too keen of having the touch pad surface being glossy metallic. It’s nice from the design perspective, but not very practical in usability as it can be rather sticky to scroll when our fingers are not very dry (sweaty hands nightmare?).

Speakers
The built-in Altec Lansing speakers seems pretty good (above average) for a laptop. It produce crisp mid to high range sounds at about half the maximum volume. Raising the volume will reduce the crisp and shows the limitation of the speakers. Like most laptop speakers, the low base sounds are of poor quality due to the lack of a subwoofer. For audio enthusiast, the included headphone output would provide better sounds when connected to a quality headphone or speakers.

I/O Ports
The Compaq CQ45 is equiped with quite an array of input and output ports. It is currently one of the very few laptops in this price range that offers a HDMI output port to connect it to a LCD TV for a bigger viewing experience, but lacks a more traditional S-Video output for connecting to older video devices.

It also feature an Expansion Port 3 for ease of connecting with HP’s QuickDock or Docking Station. The other I/O ports are rather standard for a laptop like a VGA output, RJ-11, RJ-45, headphone, microphone, 3x USB ports (3rd port shared with eSATA port), eSATA (faster data transfer than USB 2.0), IR, ExpressCard/54, 5-in-1 card reader (SD,MMC, MS, MSPro, xD), Fingerprint reader, 1.3MP webcam.

On the wireless front, this Compaq CQ45 comes with the latest intel WiFi Link 5100 that supports 802.11a/b/g/(draft)n WLAN. I do not have any wireless-n router to test if it does offer any advancement of up to 300Mbps data rate or better range from the newly supported 802.11n standard, but it does perform pretty well operating on 802.11g in a nearby cafe with wifi hotspot, receiving strong signal from about 5 meters away from the access point.

Performance
The performance of the Compaq CQ45 is quite good considering it is quite well beefed up (specs-wise) for a laptop. The dedicated graphic card does lend a hand to give it a better overall score in some benchmark compared to the integrated intel graphics.

PCMark: 4840

wPrime (32M): 34.729s
Windows Experience Index: 3.5

Heat & Noise
The Compaq CQ45 did get a little warmer than I would appreciate, especially on the left palm rest area where it can get rather warm at about 48 degrees Celcius (the hard drive is beneath here). The underside also do gets quite warm after about 30 minutes of browsing the web and some word processing, playing 3D games would heat it up even faster.

The processor is well cooled at about 34 degrees Celcius while idle and up to 56 degrees Celcius during load. However, the left and center underside could easily reach 51 degrees Celcius during idle and up to 75 degrees Celcius when under heavy load such as playing a movie or a game (the dedicated graphic card do contribute a lot to the heat). It is therefore not recommended to use this on your lap. Elevating the rear of the laptop a little could help the laptop to cool better or perhaps investing in a good notebook cooler would help ease a few degrees from the underside of the laptop.

All the heat buildup does gets the fan spinning rather fast to disperse the heat out, as well as some noise from it. But its not as loud as to the point of being annoying unless its in a very quiet room. Even my ceiling fan seems to drown the laptop fan noise. By the way, the room temperature here in Malaysia is approximately 30 degrees Celcius on a sunny afternoon.

* Temperature measurement based on CPUID HWMonitor reading *

Battery Life
The 6-cell battery included with the Compaq CQ45 performs rather mediocre and might disappoint some road warriors. The Compaq CQ45 only manage to get about 2 hours and 20 minutes of battery life while browsing the web via wifi connectivity before it reaches critical 6% level. During testing, the screen brightness was set to 50% with all the power savings settings enabled.

Conclusion
The Compaq CQ45-127TX is well positioned as a value for money laptop with a good price to performance (and features) ratio, with a nice design and build-quality to top it off. However, the battery life might be a little disappointing for a road warrior, and the heat might be a bit too warm for comfort on the palm rest.

Pros:

  • Good performance and graphics
  • Good build quality
  • Sleek design
  • Value for money

Cons:

  • Heat at left palm rest and underside rather warm
  • Glossy finishing (and touchpad) attracts fingerprints and stains like magnet
  • Mediocre battery life
October 16th, 2008 in Hardware, Reviews | 9 Comments

Conquered Mt. Kinabalu: The Journey – Day 2

The journey up Mount Kinabalu continues on Day 2…

Day 2

  • 2 AM : Depart from Laban Rata for the remaining 2km up to the peak of Mount Kinabalu
  • The temparature is now about 6 degress, and the surroundings is dark but still slightly visible thanks to the full moon. We’ll need to gear up in warm winter clothings, beanie, gloves, and a torch (headlamp) to light our way up from here on (some snacks and water too)

  • It’s another series of steep stairs for the early part of this trail (about 500m). Many climbers would basically be queuing up the steps and the exhaustion from yesterday’s climb will start to take its toll for some
  • Next comes the exciting part of the entire climb, the beginning of our “rock walk”. Climbing up along the edges of the mountain rocks with a white rope to lead us to the peak and to help pull ourselves up along certain steep path of the rocks, which is also perhaps the most dangerous part of the climb

  • We’ll then arrive at the last rest hut – the Sayat-sayat checkpoint where we’ll have out permit checked before the final ascend up to the peak. The climb from here is just a long uphill slope up the rocks. It looks like we’re very near the top from here, yet it’s actually quite a distance from the peak. The tiredness and the thin air effects starts to have some impact on the climb up

  • As we get closer to the peak, we’ll see a couple of other peaks along the way such as the Donkey Ears, St. John’s Peak and the South Peak

  • I only manage to reach the Donkey Ears during sunrise (Approx. 5:30AM), but eventually made it up the highest point, Low’s Peak at about 7AM. The satisfaction of finally reaching the peak at 4095m and the sense of accomplishment… all the tiredness and pain seems to disappear for a moment

  • After admiring the scenery around the peak, it’s time descent back to Laban Rata. The journey down is much easier to the muscles but the pain on my knee can slowly be felt. The stairs can be rather slippery and I almost slip at some part
  • About an hour plus later, we’re back down at Laban Rata for a short rest, freshen up and have some breakfast before resuming the descent down
  • It’s now all the way down to Kinabalu Park on the same 6km trail. Here’s where a walking stick can be helpful along some tricky parts of the descent and a helping aid to my sore knee. It took me about an hour to descent 1km on average
  • Remember the easy downhill walk I mentioned during the ascent? The last 100m of the descent is now a climb up to the Timpohon Gate where we started our trail. After all the descend for the day, my legs felt like giving up on climbing up the steps. I basically limped my way with the walking stick
  • Finally, we got back to Kinabalu Park and got our color certificate of accomplishment for having reached the peak of Mount Kinabalu. Due to the time we took to get down, we sort of had our belated lunch cum dinner at the Kinabalu Park’s cafe before departing back to Kota Kinabalu

While documenting my journey up Mt. Kinabalu, I’ve also found an interesting website [ClimbMtKinabalu.com] that’s worth checking out (I think it’s a better description of the journey than what I’ve wrote).

It’s an amazing journey up Mt. Kinabalu. I do certainly recommend anyone with the heart for adventure and nature to give it a go. Despite experiencing severe muscles ache to the extend where I’m basically limping around and going up/down stairs is a real pain for a week after the climb (thanks to my lack of regular exercise and physical preparation prior to the trip); the journey is worth it in my opinion, and I’m proud to say… I’ve conquered Mt. Kinabalu!!

August 14th, 2008 in Travel | No Comments

Conquered Mt. Kinabalu: The Journey – Day 1

So here’s my little travel log of my journey to the peak of Mt. Kinabalu…

Pre-Day 1

  • Arrived Kinabalu Park at about 5 PM from Kota Kinabalu on a mini-bus (van) en-route to Ranau which took us about 2 hours
  • Check-in at our Chalet and have a short walk around the park
  • Attended a briefing for tomorrow’s big climb by a park ranger

Day 1

  • Had breakfast and packed our lunch from Kinabalu Park’s cafe
  • Checked-in with the Kinabalu Park’s reception and assigned to our guide
  • Depart on a bus to the starting point at Timpohon Gate. It’s quite a distance from the Kinabalu Park’s reception area, highly recommended to take the bus and save your energy for the actual ascent instead.
  • 10 AM : Begin our ascent up Mount Kinabalu from Timpohon Gate

  • The journey begins with some easy downhill walk (which I’ll talk about it later) till a nice little waterfall to mark the beginning of a 6km of never-ending path of stairs up Mount Kinabalu

  • The vegetations along the way changes as the altitude increase. From the lush dense tropical rainforest to the alpine trees and little scrub plants as we get higher up Mount Kinabalu
  • About every kilometer along the journey, there’s little huts to rest and refill our bottles with fresh mountain water (untreated water, but its save to drink – I had a few refills myself)

  • The last 2km of the climb before arriving at Laban Rata is quite tough, big steep steps of rocks. I practically took a break approximately every 20m of the climb, arriving at the 500m checkpoints along the path seems like quite far apart (There’s markings every 0.5km along the path to indicate our progress)


  • 5 PM : Finally, the sight of Laban Rata… a very welcomed sight after the tiring hike up

  • Took a nice heated shower and dinner. Lights out at about 8 PM, and had a well deserved rest before the final ascent up to the peak of Mount Kinabalu at 2 AM
August 5th, 2008 in Travel | 3 Comments