Compaq is a much-maligned computer company (and for good reason, based on the quality of their older products) which merged with Hewlett-Packard ("HP") and subsequently became worth buying products from.
Today, the UPS man brought two packages, as HP made good on their promise of replacements within 24-48 hours. As promised, my replacement battery was in one of the packages. In the other was another incorrect power supply of the same type as the last. I have now spent over two hours (over several days, even) getting a replacement power supply for my warranted, business-class HPQ laptop.
In the ongoing saga of My Compaq nw9440 laptop, the DC power cable coming from my power supply developed a break and subsequently caused the repeated full draining of my battery, which will now not charge above 49%. So I decided to try the online chat system and see if it works on Firefox/Linux - which, amazingly, it does. I tried to use it less than a year ago and was rebuffed, so I took this to be an encouraging sign. You'd think that by this point in my life, I would know better...
A picture of the Compaq IPAQ C500 Legacy-Free PC.
Like many laptops, the Compaq nw9440 has a Synaptics touchpad. If you want to scroll like the big boys, which is to say with the right side of the touchpad, then you need to make some changes to your xorg.conf. I also use a USB pointer (Logitech TrackMan Wheel, the second generation Marble) and I wanted to be able to use both at once, either/or, et cetera. The touchpad can supposedly be used pressure-sensitively in The GIMP, which is another possible motivation.
I have a Compaq nw9440 "Mobile Workstation" class system, P/N (or type or something) EZ901#AA. There are a number of different systems called the nw9440 which come in the same case, which are slightly different. I won't go into it here; this isn't an ad for HP. In fact, this laptop has presented (in my opinion) more than its fair share of obstacles in my pursuit of Linux. ACPI is slightly wonky, the modem is from Conexant, and video, of all things, has been a major PITA. This is highly unfortunate because this laptop has quite excellent graphics, in fact carrying the best of breed for its date of release - the NVIDIA Quadro FX1500. In particular, I am able to use the display panel only at its maximum resolution.
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