The replacement for my DOA HP Mini PC arrived today. I originally ordered the PC on June 30, and had hoped to set it up over the July 4 weekend, but now I guess I’m setting it up this weekend. (It does, at least, boot up, so that’s good.)
I think there’s going to be some bureaucratic back and forth on it, in terms of the warranty and registration. My HP account now shows the old broken PC under my name, but not the new one. And the serial number on the new one is not recognized. I had the same problem with the serial # on the previous PC. I get the feeling that HP has some weird cobbled-together system, where the serial # on a new PC doesn’t show in their online systems until a few days (or weeks) after it has shipped. So I think I’ll let it sit, then come back and check again in a week or so.
I may also need to straighten out the three-year extended warranty that I bought with the PC. I never got an email acknowledgement about that, and I don’t know if it’ll automatically attach itself to the new PC, or what. So I’m going to give that a week or so too, then follow up.
Here are some random notes about the basic setup and features on it:
- It works fine with the IOGear KVM that I bought for it.
- It appears to have an internal speaker, so I don’t need to worry about hooking up external speakers yet. The internal speaker is obviously not very good, but it’s enough so that I can hear basic audio for now.
- I bought an external DVD burner to use with it, but haven’t tried it out yet.
- From the specs, I wasn’t sure if it had Bluetooth or not. It does. So I might pair my AirPods with it, at some point.
- I also wasn’t sure if it had WiFi or not; it does. I’m planning on sticking with a wired connection, but it’s good to know I can use WiFi if I have to.
- The initial setup wasn’t too bad. It’s been a while since I’ve set up a PC from scratch. It’s definitely smoother than it used to be. Windows pulled over most of my preferences, settings, and even some installed software from my old desktop. So there’s less stuff to configure and install than there used to be.
- It came with something called HP Wolf Security, which is probably useless, but I guess I’ll leave it installed. I think it might be a subscription thing that expires after a year. I’ll worry about it then, I guess.
- I’m starting with OneDrive set to download files on-demand, so my 400 GB worth of files are all still in the cloud and the 1 TB drive is mostly empty. I’ve been slowly getting more comfortable with relying on the cloud; I used to have my desktop PC set to keep all of my files local, so I could back them up. But I turned that setting off a while ago, and have been clicking the “free up space” option on some folders here and there, when I start to run low on disk space. So I guess now I’m just going to let that go entirely and trust the cloud. (Maybe I should shop around for some service that backs up OneDrive to somewhere else…)
Overall, I got a bunch of the basics done today, in the background, while I was working from home. I’ll try to get some of the harder stuff done tomorrow.
I’m not sure when I’m going to switch over and consider it my “main machine.” I guess the most critical piece of software I have now that isn’t largely cloud-based is Quicken. So there’s going to have to be a point where I stop using Quicken on my old PC and start using it on my new one.
And I also need to figure out what I’m going to do with my music library. I still have 100 GB worth of MP3 files on my old PC. It’s all basically synced up to Apple Music at this point, so I could just install Apple Music on the new PC and trust that my library is safe in Apple’s hands.