Today something happened that I never though could happen:
My Thinkpad died.
And I really mean it. The device did noting more than beep once long and twice short. A quick look at the very informative support pages of IBM showed me that the worst possible thing happened: Failure on the System Board or the RAM (which is just as bad as I have only built-in RAM).
A call to the IBM support line got me a ticket number and about half an hour later, they told me to send the machine to their repair center but because I can reach that by train and foot in about 15 minutes from my office, I’ve asked whether I can bring it to them which they accepted.
So now I’m working on a helplessly underpowered Thinkpad T41 that was lying around in the office. Starting Delphi takes a bit more than a minute just to give you an impression of it’s speed (256 MB of RAM is much too less for me)
They told me that the computer will be fixed in two to three days, so I will have to live through the week-end without my beloved Thinkpad. Too bad.
This is the first of about 7 Thinkpads in my life where something like that happened which should speak a lot for their incredible quality. And while this whole story was certainly annoying, the support was helpful and speditive. This is all I could ask for. Thanks IBM.
In case you ask how I could get to work on the new computer so fast: I’ve removed the harddrive of the defective machine and put it into the older one. While Windows XP comlained a bit about the graphic driver on the new machine, the rest of the hardware was detected flawlessly, so this was extremely un-painful. To be on the secure side non the less, I’ve created an image of the partition containing my personal data [note to self: Finally blog about your partition scheme].
gnegg 