http://norman.walsh.name/2004/04/27/toshiba 7 65 2004-04-27T08:26:00-04:00 $Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2004 Norman Walsh Toshiba warranty repair gets five stars in my book. Goethe We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained. You may have noticed a significant pause since my last post here. Or maybe you didn’t, but that’s OK. What happened was, a week ago yesterday, my AC adapter shorted out and fried my laptop’s power supply. Cue sound effects: “crackle”. Cue olfactory effects: “ozone”. Cue Norm: “Oh, F*CK!” The odd coincidence is that I was in the middle of backing things up to a desktop machine because I’d been planning to send the laptop in for repair: the fan was making a horrible racket. We’re talking seriously loud. Fan bearing about to fail loud. Digging around the Toshiba web site, I was actually able to find the repair center. There was even a form for me to check the warranty status of my laptop. Remarkably, it is still under warranty! (Four years! Sweet!) You may remember that I dropped my laptop a few months back and wrecked the hard disk. So, knowing that the first thing the warranty repair folks were going to do was rewrite the disk, I sent them the old one with a note saying that I knew I broke it and I didn’t expect them to replace it. I also explained that I roasted the power supply and finally that I thought the fan was genuinely a warranty repair. So off it went. Quick recap: I expect them to charge me for replacing the power supply, I expect them to return the damaged disk, and I expect them to replace the fan. Five days later, my laptop is back. They replaced the system board, the fan, the power supply, the hard disk and the keyboard (which they said didn’t work). No charge. No questions asked. Five stars. YMMV, of course. Extra kudos to Toshiba for a useful web site. Now to get a weeks worth of mail sorted…