I recently had a problem with my Presario R3000 laptop. The battery was completely drained and would not charge. The laptop is still under warranty, so I figured I would contact support and see what my options were. Before doing that thought I checked the Compaq/HP support website to see if there were any updates for my laptop. There was a firmware update that was supposed to fix a problem where if the battery is completely drained, the laptop won't charge it. Hey, that sounds like my problem! So, I flashed my laptop's firmware with the new release. Everything went well, but it didn't seem to help my battery problem. So, I decided to contact HP. I went back to their website and noticed they have an option to do a live chat online with tech support. So, I clicked the link and I was greeted by a tech almost immediately. That was a surprise! He got my details and gave me a procedure to try to "recalibrate" the battery. I was pretty sure this wouldn't work, but I figured I should at least try it. I did the procedure and as I thought, it didn't help. So, the next day I got back on the tech support website and started a new chat. The tech got online right away and I explained my problem and told him what I had done the previous day. He said it sounds like my battery really is dead and that since it is under warranty, they would send me a new one at no charge. HP shipped it FedEx overnight, with a return label for my old battery. I put the new battery in and everything is working great!

Anyway, just thought I'd share this, since most of the time all I read are horror stories about tech support! Thanks HP!

Internet Explorer 7 is getting tabs. That's great! I really like the tabbed interface in Firefox. In this blog entry, Tony mentions how Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer share code:

Another example of what makes this challenging is that IE and Explorer windows share the same code for the frame and chrome (toolbars, menus, etc.), which means there are more code paths and different types of interactions with the hosted view (in this case, a ShellView) that were required to continue working after adding tabbed browsing to IE.

That got me thinking how nice it would be if Windows Explorer had tabs too. I always find myself with about 6 or 7 Explorer windows open after working on my PC for a while. It would be great to just have them all in tabs in one window. So how about it Microsoft, can we have tabs in Windows Explorer too?