Thursday, December 27, 2007

Experience with One Laptop Per Child

As I wrote yesterday, the XO computer I bought from One Laptop per Child does not work. I opened it two days ago, turned it on, and the only thing that happened was that a green light went on indicating that the computer was on, and a yellow light went on indicating that the battery was charging. The screen stayed blank. Eventually the yellow light changed to green, indicating that the battery had charged, but nothing else changed. I tried rebooting, to no avail.

It took some time to fire up another computer and find the supporting documentation for the XO on the web. (The touching faith of the XO designers that it would be good for kids to figure out how to work the machine without instructions was becoming more and more annoying.) No help.

On Christmas day I got a negative response from the telephone help desk, not surprising on that holiday. Then I emailed to the help people, and several hours got a suggestion that I reboot the machine (quorws from the online instructions). I dutifully did so, with the same negative results. Yesterday morning I called the help desk and after about 15 minutes on hold got an operator who took may name, address and phone number and said someone would get back to me. I also sent another email message to the help desk. No response to this time.

More later.

2 comments:

Wayan said...

John,

May I suggest you post your issue on the OLPC News XO Laptop Help Forum http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?board=1.0

We've had a few other people encounter a dead XO and we've been able to revive them all so far.

Good luck!

John Daly said...

I joined the others posting on this issue. None of them seem to have been helped. I note that the Return Merchandise Authorization telephone number is always busy. You can find it and the rest of the process at this website.