Its not HP nor is it an artifact of obsolescence. I have a 4 month old Microsoft Surface Pro 4 that had that exact thing happen a week or 2 ago. I just took it to Best Buy's Geek Squad because I have a "2 year warranty" with them after buying the computer in July, and they had it fixed in about 3 hours. If you can't fix it yourself, take it to a tech, 'cuz its the <> update that did it, not your computer.

Having worked in government, I actually understood it on the 1st read!

Love what you do? There's no such thing. As soon as I start HAVING to do something, it becomes something to tolerate and not enjoy. Has happened with every job, including those outside of software. Don't ask me, but that's just the way it is.

This idea is false. I'm retired, not working on a damn thing, and am very happy. OTOH, I think I was happiest when I had my sci-tech advisor job in Iraq, because I was able to do it well, and considered that it might save a soldier, which I believed to be very worthwhile, so yeah, if you must work, then yeah, the premise is true.

1. As much acceleration as I can afford 2) All Wheel Drive 3) Record of kicking a** all over the world in the World Rally Championship So I can only buy a few cars, Subaru and Audi, and can only afford Subaru, so I have a 2015 Subaru WRX. I road rally with the Sports Car Club of America. Acceleration and nimble handling are quite important, even when they don't appear to need to be. I've been buying WRX's since 2005, and sold the last one in May, after owning it for 3 years, with 124,000 miles on the odometer. I drove it most of the way across the USA multiple times getting to road rallies far away, and mostly burned it to the ground with the excessive use. But it _was_ quick and we won a lot of rallies.

Working on a project to document all the visual details of a road so that, once the road is driven once, the program can be used to highlight relevant changes in the road from day to day when it is driven again. Objective: Spot places where soil / pavement has been disturbed, trees have changed configuration, etc. in order to spot potential IED plants that could harm our troops. Some unusual people have this ability as part of their brains, but more average folk could use a head-up display in their vehicles that would allow them to spot an 8" artillery shell in a tree that is rigged to a pressure switch in the road to blow up whoever drives by. Defeating these sorts of IEDs would save a lot of lives, even including indigenous civilians.

I'm retired, and as such, I can, from experience, confidently say that "work sucks." Its near-universal. Only the degree of suck changes. Your particular suck that would have me thinking suicide was the nights and weekends suck. I don't do that well. My only truly good job was a volunteer thing with the Army in Iraq, where we DID do the nights and weekends thing but I knew that going in and there wasn't anything else to do anyway. I'm retired and loving it, and your major thrust in life should be saving large amounts of $$$$ to buy an annuity with that can never ever be exhausted, and retire as early and possible. Right now, I'm contemplating renewing an old hobby since another one seems to be ending, and that is ham radio. Did the November SSB Sweepstakes last weekend, and could become a contester, dunno. But retirement is where its at, the sooner the better and the more inexhaustible supplies of money the better. I've an actual pension that's not going away (I worked for the Navy (not _in_ the Navy, but a civilian engineer)) an annuity from a large insurance company, and a little SS. The next antenna (its like boating - you always need a bigger boat... or antenna) is $7K, top of the line, on a telescoping fold-over tower that is $17K. If my other expensive hobby, road rallying, dies as expected, the savings from that will likely actually allow me to achieve that antenna / tower combination. But find something you can endure and then get the H out of it and retired at the earliest possibility.

ES-3A had excellent quality control, Tomahawk very nearly as good as ES-3A, Aegis Gun quality sucked. The gun had an impossible development schedule and the people were just demoralized and didn't try very hard at quality, although I thought we could do better, and was glad to leave the project. Yeah, it was hectic but rewarding. When your software works, it saves soldiers and sailors. If it doesn't, they may die, which was my concern with the gun. Don't know of any incidents where sailors were hurt, but the potential was there.

Defense. Navy. US Gov't employee. Highlights: Navair, ES-3A, NavSea, Aegis 5" gun, Tomahawk Launch Control. Couple trips to Iraq to work counter-IED. Retired now, but it was more interesting than the manufacturing sector I started out in.

Hey, don't think anything of it. I pay $280. Of course I have all the premium channels, phone service, high(er) speed internet service, and I'm out in the boonies with the best cable company I've ever seen, Metrocast. Anything goes wrong, and you get a tech at the door practically before you hang up the phone. I agree that the commercials are too much, so I don't watch entertainment programming other than my premium movie channels. Otherwise, I put on a 24 hour news program while interacting with my computer really entertains me. If there's 6 minutes of commercials on my new channel, what do I care? I'm not hanging on what happens next like I am with an entertainment program. I've got a project going now to create a movie library. You can get video capture hardware that, although it doesn't do HD, it is very, very good anyway, and better than recording with VHS. I'm up to about 200 movies in my collection now, and am heading for 1000. If I want to see "The Shining" or "The Sting" or maybe the original, 3hr+ "Spartacus" with Kirk Douglas (If you saw the recent movie of Mr. Peabody & Sherman, did you catch that the Spartacus character looked exactly like Kirk Douglas?) I can do it whenever I like. I have an entertainment center in my car that does DVD, and having 1000 movies along on vacation or any time I expect to have extra time parked and waiting, I can pass it a whole lot better than sitting in the car and doing Sudoku. I'm scheduled to record about 46 more movies in the next 2 weeks, all movies I've seen and enjoyed, and this I think is the "long suit" of cable. It enables movies at $0.50 each for a blank double-sided DVD instead of $2.50 (used) to $20 or more for a retail acquisition. OK, those are HD, but that's not something I'm going to be able to discern on a portable player or my 7" Kenwood DNX9140. Cable's "worth it" depending on how you use it. I also know tons and tons of current events that I don't think I could keep up on any other way than to let the 24 hour news channel blather in the background.