As I mentioned, I spent hours attempting to get the touchpad on this laptop to do stupid stuff like… scroll.

I spent a lot of time scouring the web for info.  Apparently this touchpad is not the default Synaptics version, although it will use the synaptics driver with modifications.   As it turned out, no matter how many modifications I made, it flatly refused to scroll.  At times I made modifications that stopped the touchpad from moving the cursor at all.  All in all it was a most impressive evening, as well as one of the reasons I want to strangle corporations like Dell and OSes like Ubuntu.

The real joy came a bit later when the picture on the laptop’s screen shrunk.  Yes, you’re reading that right, it shrunk as if it was put into the dryer and the image only took up two thirds of the total screen space.  This was most impressive; I have never seen or heard of this before.

What was more impressive was that the behavior continued while booting up, after removing the battery, and no matter what I did.  When your 13.3″ monitor is only two thirds full, you feel even more inadequate than you do using a 13.3″ monitor in the first place.

With little else to do, I ran the Dell diagnostics.  BEEP SPLURT BEEP BEEP AAAAAAAAAAH BEEP BEEP ALERT.  Apparently it found something wrong.  I was going to write down exactly what it found wrong but instead I spent the ensuing seconds looking for a pointy object with which to poke out my own eardrums (like Fran Drescher’s husbands).

I took the laptop to work today so I could call Dell.  I had not yet worked out how I was going to get the error codes down with all that aural cacophony but I did my best (while my coworkers tried to poke their eardrums out - one of them actually succeeded but that’s a story for another day).

The Dell tech was also most impressed.  His documentation showed that the LCD was broken.  The actual error message was that it was unable to communicate with the EEPROM, so I wasn’t as convinced.  Rebooting with an external monitor hooked up proved the Dell tech correct, as it worked beautifully, while the laptop’s screen was still smooshed (technical term, sorry).

This is a bit disappointing for a laptop that’s about a month old.  In any case, Dell has always been good with their warranty replacements and will be sending a new screen and tech to install it tomorrow.  I don’t mind doing the work but I refuse to work on laptop innards.  I ran out of that kind of patience about forty years ago.   Some would argue that I never had that kind of patience in the first place.

The tech asked me at first what OS the laptop was running.  Thinking on my feet (rest assured, that was an interesting sight), I told him it came with XP (well it did).

In other news, my coworker with the other E4300 took it to a laundromat last night.  No, he didn’t feel it needed cleaning.  Apparently his quilt needed cleaning and the laptop kept him busy for the time it took to clean it.  He was very happy with the laptop’s performance.  He gloated for a moment, right up until I announced that all of the women at the laundromat thought he was a girly man because his laptop only had a 13.3″ screen (ooh, it’s so small and cute!) and he was doing women’s work at the laundromat.  He stopped gloating immediately.

Meanwhile, I’m still without a scrolling touchpad.  The keyboard has one of those nipples on it but I don’t like those (on keyboards).