I got to the third round of sending, adn re-sending mine to Texas. Sent many letters and emails (one even tot he President of HP); and, I was finally connected with a tech support person… from Canada.

This time, instead of my sending back the notebook for the third time, he sent me a hard-drive, and walked me through the repair.

This was four years ago, the notebook worked for a few months after that, and it broke again. At that point, the warranty lapsed, and they wouldn’t take it back.

Finally, I simply cracked-open the warranty-less paperweight, discovered the fan had been fried, and replaced it. That fixed the problem.

In the end, for me I felt like I was on the tip of an iceberg of a products case where the central component was a design defect (putting an AMD processor in a box with a fan that couldn’t cool it enough, and thereby costing the consumers countless dollars in time and repair costs).

Simply put, HP doesn’t design laptops very well, and they could never seem to get the hang of cooling a box down enough to make sure a hard-drive doesn’t melt.

And I went to school to learn the law, not computers.

Furthermore, unless you are hell bent on driving yourself broke, “frivolous” and “medical malpractice cases” just don’t go together. Obviously, if it is a “frivolous,” or meritless case, no thinking med mal attorney is going to take it, because he will be throwing his money down the drain.

To me, all of this has the same “logic” as the folks who repeat, mantra-like, that there can be no healthcare reform whithout tort reform. Tort reform refers to a legal process, while reforming the healthcare system has to do with just that–healthcare. Making healthcare available to all at a reasonable price, and making sure that it is of good quality, are admirable goals, but ones which have nothing to do with tort “reform.” But for many, repetition seems to make it true. And unfortunately, the GOP knows this.