ThinkPad Therapy

See, it's like this........ When I'm frustrated with something, and I can't resolve the problem to my satisfaction, what I do is to fix something. That generally means a computer, or two..... As you guys know, I've been going round and round with Dell over the charge connector on my son's tablet. So far, the results haven't been very good. So over the course of the last few days, I've resorted to self-medicating! No, not like that!

My form of self-medicating started out with a lavender colored IBM ThinkPad X30. About a year and half ago when my then-four-year-old daughter needed a computer. Unlike my son who wasn't really delivered, but "booted-up", she wasn't as electronics oriented as the boy. So I endeavored to make her first computer more "friendly", when experimenting with a rather large and black ThinkPad A21p didn't go very well. So I found her a small "X Series" machine that had enough power to get her on the internet to play some games, and yet be small and unintimidating. Thus was born the "Princess Edition", X30 that I spent the better part of a week painting to get ready for her birthday that year. Well, time has come and gone, as have Patches and Service Packs, which didn't do the old girl any good. So, a few weeks ago, I breathed some life (screen, SSD, RAM) into a derelict X61 and baby girl got an upgrade. This of course left a $3000+, in year-2002-dollars laptop which runs on a PIII-M! If I was in any way normal, it would have found it's way to the garage to sit in a box till eventually it would be disposed of. 

But No.....that's NOT what frustrated, Frugal Propellerheads do! I already had an X31 base (P-M/1.6) sitting in a cabinet, so why not slap together a knock around laptop. However, it was lavender! Can't be seen running around with a lavender laptops, now can we? So, an hour of sanding time later, it was no longer black. I had for some time watched YouTube videos showing guys (some, more successful than other) painting most anything to look like carbon fiber. Here was the perfect excuse to "give it a go" as our British friends would say. The lid already had been none-too-gently sanded; so what you see here are the results.

I sprayed the entire thing silver, taped on the liner, then sprayed on flat black through the rubber mesh. This is what it looked like after the liner was taken off. As you can see, I made a mistake in not stretching the material flat to eliminate the creases.

In this second picture, I had "fogged" the lid with the flat black and the creases aren't nearly as obvious.

After a second fogging, it's much more uniform, and is now awaiting a "satin" clearcoat.

After the clearcoat, it actually looks pretty good, for a really quick-slapped-together job. Over all, I'm pretty happy with it. Particularly since it was for therapy anyway. So people paint, others do wood-working: I work on computers!
 

 

State of Support: Part 2

I know this is going to come off as a rant, but it's really not; just bear with me. 

A couple of days ago, I interacted with Dell's consumer product support center in India for the 3rd time....and I suspect, the last. Although this rep was much more difficult to understand language-wise, but much more enlightening from the standpoint of policy. Here's what this person explained to me, which by the way is the first time I've heard this: in order for their "normal" 90-Day warranty on "refurbished" products to apply, I needed to have bought it directly from Dell. End of story.

So, naturally, I got in touch with Newegg, who had told me in the beginning (Dec. 21st) that the tablet had the "Dell" refurbished product warranty. This time, the Newegg rep, asked me to fill out a form that they would email me, so that they could act as my agent and take it up with Dell. Two days later, I received an email saying that they hadn't made any progress since it the tablet was "out of warranty" and that they were very sorry and could offer me a $60 certificate for credit for my trouble.

I'm mad, but I'm tired of fighting this battle for what is now, a $65 difference from the purchase price. So, I'm going to get in touch with them and accept their generous offer and move on to more important things; like BunnyNet (will explain in another post). 

This whole episode takes me back to the pre-2000 days when I was trying to learn all things computing. I had graduated from a self-built 486 to a Toshiba desktop. Bet most of you weren't even aware that they made anything but laptops! After a few months of owning this thing, I really wanted a laptop as well. This turned out to be the IBM ThinkPad 701c. Then as now, I tended to be somewhat out there on the edge with my portable technology. It was one of the first sub-notebooks, which was indeed under 5lbs. AND had a footprint smaller than a sheet of paper. Of course, in those days, that meant a 10.1" screen, no optical drive, in fact, no internal drives what-so-ever except for the HDD. The keyboard even had to fold in and out (hence the Butterfly name)! It came with a floppy, but I had to get my own external optical drive if I wanted to load software w/o lots of hassles. So, I bought what I could afford at the time; a Panasonic 8x portable drive that worked through PCMCIA. 

 

For any of you who worked with various devices in those days (Windows 3.11 to 95) days, you are well aware of all the work that was a part of anything unusual. Lots of driver issues, sorting IRQs, and DMA......just a lot of time spent on the phone with tech support. Call me a glutton for punishment, but it kind of stimulated my interest, and probably caused me to move into IT eventually. 

Now, take this next section with a grain of salt, because there's quite a bit of generalization and "seat-of-the-pants" analysis that would stay with me for years to come: through my Professional IT years and on till now. Here goes:

• American firms handle customer relations in general and tech support specifically, different than others. In short; better (from the customer standpoint). I account for this as a cultural phenominon, as much as, if not more than a business practice. I'm just not a strong believer that the concept of "the customer is always right" is generally practiced in other countries very often.
• Japanese firms make and design GREAT products, but God help you if something goes wrong! They expend so much energy into making their products "perfect" that they just can't believe that there'd be an issue that was their responsibility! 
• Third world countries are just that. Large corporations are monolithic and the policies are not to be questioned and that employees are to do everything possible to protect the company's last penny, even if it means hurting it on the PR front. The workers simply can't conceive of a situation where an angry customer will simply move on to other competitors and often refuse to buy from that provider again. In their world, that kind of behavior is unthinkable. If something goes wrong, then the individual is to simply accept that as Karma and hope that it will all balance out in the future.

Back when I owned the ThinkPad 701, I could call IBM Tech support with anything regarding that machine and they'd do their best to resolve it. It didn't matter which of their call centers you got routed to, but notably, they were in North Carolina, Toronto, and Dublin, Ireland (who in my opinion was absolutely the best....incredibly patient, if difficult for an American to understand at times). They took on the driver issues with that Panasonic CD-ROM, fixed IRQ and DMA problems, as well as walk me through sorting Windows 95 which didn't come on the machine. 

Not surprisingly, Dell's consumer tech support center in India uniformly takes a hard-line, coming up with every excuse under the sun why they shouldn't honor their warranty, and Newegg goes above and beyond to offer me a store credit when the table is clearly beyond the realm of their 30 day return policy! The probability that I'll buy any consumer grade Dell product again isn't good, but I'll sure continue shopping at Newegg!