IBM Warantee Information
IBM Warantee Information
Related to some of the others I’ve seen here and on the web complaining about their IBM battery life on Thinkpads (raph was it? I forget).. my T23 battery finally stopped holding a charge about 2 weeks ago. It started to decrease slowly in overall on-battery time, but now I get about 10-15 minutes out of it. It reaches about 50%, then drops down to 5% in about 20 seconds and gives me the low battery warning. It won’t hold a charge at all.
What’s interesting though, is that I habitually charge it to full, then unplug, then let it run down while I use it to about 1%, then plug it back in. I’ve been told that this is the way to ensure longer life out of the battery (I realize they don’t have memory, and this isn’t to prevent that). I never keep the battery in the unit when it’s sitting at 100% fully charged.
So I called IBM today to report the problem. The woman said that IBM laptop batteries are only waranteed for 1 year, and are generally “..are not engineered to last longer than that..“. I told her I got the laptop about a year ago, maybe 10 months, but I’d forgotten exactly when. She checked, and found out that my 1-year warantee runs out ON WEDNESDAY. That was 2 days away.
Funny thing too, my history at IBM for this laptop is longer than my credit report. It’s already been into them 5 times for repair and had various innards replaced multiple times.
Needless to say, a new battery is on its way to me, care of IBM Customer Care. How’s that for good luck. Whew.
Other Stuff
- Trying to grok XML for use in an upcoming release of pilot-link. It makes sense for the type of data we’re representing on these devices, and it fits in with a product idea I’ve been working on in my head.
- Investigating SyncML.
Weird questionable licensing involved there. They basically make the claim that if you don’t properly protect your IP when using/implementing it, they own whatever you don’t claim. Odd arrangement. It’s not clear I can use it freely yet in my code. What I’m probably going to end up doing is writing mod_syncml for Apache and use that. I’m hesitant to try the oddball Java versions I’ve been seeing floating around. I found an interesting thread on it over at handhelds.org.
If anyone is feeling generous, I’ve earmarked the SyncML book on my Amazon Wishlist.
- More RFC reading, this time 2445 for iCal objects. It’s not clear to me whether or not I should directly support this in pilot-link yet, or just go straight to XML, and skip the whole ldif/iCal/vCard/vTodo train.
- Community domains expiring.
I’ve been managing and maintaining a bunch of community lists, work, code in cvs, websites, and code for quite awhile now, out of my own pocket. Some of the domains are coming up for expiry soon (two weeks). Since I’ve been unable to find paying work in 466 days, I’m wondering if I should just let them expire, or make a plea to the community to chip in a few bucks and help me keep them alive.
Has anyone run into this before? What do/did you do?
- Someone special has a birthday coming up. We just had Valentines Day and our 3rd anniversary. So many things so close together. Not sure what I’ll be able to do without any income, but I’ll think of something. She’s turning the big 31 this year, while I’ll be 32 in a few months. Some days I feel 62.