The technician did arrive this morning, as promised, with a replacement system board from the lovely people at HP. This was a good thing.

He spent the next two hours fitting my shiny new system board. Guess what? It didn’t work. The engineer very apologetically explained that the board sent by the lovely people at HP Support worked very well with my shiny new screen, but not with any of the other components in my laptop. So it had a nicely working screen, but wouldn’t start up.

He said he’d get in touch with HP Support and get them to send a new new system board, and a new hard drive (to replace the one that I had replaced a couple of months ago), “just in case” that was causing a problem.

He’s coming back tomorrow. So, as of tomorrow, my £138.65 next-working-day post-warranty support package has taken a minimum of five working days to actually produce a working laptop. That’s if tomorrow’s fix actually works, which would be a first. And, of course, this is all to fix a fault that occured during the warranty period.

Great service, only from HP.