Sunday, August 20, 2006

My sad ThinkPad story

I usually leave my IBM ThinkPad G40 running overnight. Big mstake. On Friday night the fan malfunctioned and it overheated. Notice the large power supply in the picure. That thing is great during winter to keep your feet warm. And where the air comes out the side you can keep you4 coffee warm too.
This whole weekend has been wasted installing all my apps on a replacement laptop, so that I can send the damn ThinkPad in for repairs or whatever. When it comes back it's going to be transformed into an Ubuntu Linux server with LAMP and Samba.
I paid nearly R20 000 for my ThinkPad G40 with 1GB ram and a 3GHz P4 processor. It has given me trouble from the moment I started using it. First, the hard drive died on day 8. I lost a week's worth of emails and a week's worth of work setting up the damn thing.
It's always had a heat problem. Let's see how much money the IBM guys try to rip me off to fix it. last time they "fixed" the hard drive, by replacing it, they installed Windows XP Home Edition on it and wasted even more time. Then whenthey got the correct (professional) version of XP going, they installed some spyware as well.
I bought the ThinkPad in May 2004, but culd only start using it the week before Christmas 2004. By new year's day 2005 it was already in the workshop, and my old Fujitech laptop finally gave up and died a few days after I got the ThinkPad back.

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