Laptop warranty repair

Years ago, I was quite impressed with ThinkPad warranty repair. Either a return-paid box would turn up quickly from IBM or I could take the machine to a local service center (a weird side-entrance to an apparently unrelated business) where a guy who was really into ham radio and the like would fix it. So, I was a happy customer.

More recently, my Lenovo warranty repair in the US had a guy from IBM come to my house and fix the hardware. Curiously, the process made the machine unbootable. I had caught sight of probably some probably Windows thing repairing the drive. On a hunch, I tried restoring the master boot record and that returned things to normal, I assume some dreadful auto-repair thing wrote data when it oughtn't.

Warranty repair in the UK has been rather less impressive. The machine worked fine except that it would crash hard whenever jostled. Apparently this can be due to software problems so first they wanted me to wipe my hard drive and reinstall and suchlike! I told them what I thought of that idea. The machine has an SSD, I doubt there's even an accelerometer. When they did finally condescend to have an engineer look at it, I had to send the machine off to Cheshire, they told me one afternoon that the pickup would be from 10am the next day, so I rushed around to arrange packing materials. The guy didn't show up, FedEx denied knowledge, so I arranged the pickup myself for the following day.

The laptop is now repaired but, again, it was unbootable, so they asked me if they could wipe the drive and install a new operating system. At least they asked. I told them to just return the machine, again I restored the master boot record and it's working fine. I can't say I'm impressed though, I was without it for several days and it should be easier to get a clear hardware problem fixed without unnecessary writes to the hard drive.

Update: Lenovo just sent me a text message notifying me of the shipment returning the laptop that I received days ago.

Safely settled in Taguig

It is wonderful to be back with my wife. At the moment, we can both work from home on similar schedules and be together just about all the time. My flights to Manila were with Qatar Airways via Doha which was just fine, a previous trip with Emirates via Dubai was good too, both make for an easy connection.

I heard an airliner even before 5am, I guess they may fly just about anytime. By that time, I also heard muezzins, quite a difference from the church bells that I became used to in England, I enjoy them both. There are maybe four mosques near enough to hear but I think it's mostly just a couple that are clearly audible. Another early sound is roosters crowing, and it turns out that the lot next door is now full of goats. Of course, the geckos are silent.