5 Times a Charm, the IBM saga continues
The T23 goes back to IBM again for the 5th time in less than 2 months for the same lockup problems that the previous 4 repair incidents were supposed to address.
I just received it yesterday, unboxed it, and an hour later, it started locking up. They replaced the system board, mini-PCI wifi/modem card, antenna and apparently the LCD (the dead pixel that was there is now gone), flashed the BIOS, and replaced the IDE drive.
They’ve basically replaced every single part in this laptop now exept the black. I’m not sure if they’ve replaced the CPU when they did the system board replacements, but the only three pieces remaining is the CPU, RAM, and case itself. The machine will lock up with any drive, any BIOS version, any combination of RAM, in any OS, and in the BIOS. I can reproduce the BIOS lockup every single time by walking through some of the options in order, with or without an IDE drive in the laptop.
It looks like it now could be only one of a small handful or things that could cause this:
- The CPU is overheating, and unseating itself from the socket (it’s not soldered in, it’s in a Zif).
- The case itself is heating up, causing some “adjustment” inside, which causes the machine to lock.
- The case is malformed to the point where under certain heat/humidity/cooling conditions, it causes the system to “ground” itself, locking it.
Anyway, it’s going back again for repair. Is there a Lemon Law on this?
Sorrow
- Another tragedy in the family, this one very unexpected. With respect to those involved, I’ll leave the details out. Having no family myself, I find it very hard to understand and deal with the grieving period in cases like this.
Patent for triple-double click with a half-gainer
- Though I have moral issues with Amazon’s single-click patenting, and I don’t use them personally any longer, providing an easier way for others to use them has now prompted me to set up an Amazon wishlist for those people who have been asking to help out, but aren’t quite sure how. I’ll add more stuff as I think of it.
Community Supported Development
- I’ve also set up an area for people to donate through PayPal to help support Plucker and pilot-link on both of the project websites. Once I clear up my personal responsibilities with development on both of those projects, I’ll be focusing on maturing SourceFubar a bit more. I need to get some more racking in here first though.
Anyone have any old networking gear they need to rid themselves of? Racks? nU size enclosures?