Ornoth

I’ve needed a new laptop for years. I bought my Vaio back in June of 2000, and five years equates to three or four generations in laptop-years. Of course, I was out of work for three of those years, so I didn’t feel I could afford to buy a new machine.

All that changed after I started work innovating buses last year at Bus-Innovation. By autumn, my financial house was in order enough so that I felt I could finally swing a (by now desperately needed) laptop upgrade.

After a lot of research, I ordered a Dell last November. It was a very sweet machine, but it wouldn’t run off battery power. After talking to no less than 15 CSRs—at first to fix the problem, then later in a vain attempt to get Dell to honor their “no questions asked” return policy—I finally gave them their accursed machine back and was refunded my money.

Of course, that wasted a couple months of time, both in the research I’d done and the new research necessary to decide on a new machine (there was, of course, absolutely no way in hell I was ordering anything from Dell).

Earlier, I’d dismissed IBM because they didn’t make a single widescreen notebook model, but I learned that they’d recently come out with one that looked pretty reasonable. So on December 20th I ordered one, reveling in the substantial discount that I got through my IBM employee friend, pookfreak.

I had to place my order by phone because I wanted a configuration that wasn’t available via their web site. At that time, I was told that it’d be “at least four weeks” before the machine could be shipped, because it was a very popular model. Okay, well… I’ll live.

Of course, four weeks later, the ship date was pushed out another four weeks, which placed it in the middle of my Seoul trip. I was hoping it would arrive while I was out of the country, but instead, they extended the ship date another fortnight. At that point, I sent an email to my sales rep, stating that they shouldn’t be taking orders for laptops if they couldn’t deliver them within three months of order.

Eight days later—Friday—I received my order: a shiny new Lenovo (IBM) StinkPad Z60m. 2 Ghz, 2 GB memory, 100 GB hard drive, 15.4“ LCD operating at 1680 x 1050 px. The machine appears to be getting good reviews.

Of course, given my experience with the Dell, I’m being a bit cautious about migrating to the StinkPad before I’ve done a full system acceptance test. In the two days I’ve had it, I’ve verified that it’s generally working well. There have been a couple system hiccups, but for the most part it’s being fully functional.

My biggest concern is the keyboard, which is surprising since IBM is renowned for the quality of their keyboards. However, there are some issues. It suffers the same problem of the Dell of having the Insert/Delete and Home/End and PgUp/PgDn keys buried in an unintuitive utility section at upper right. And for some blazingly stupid reason, they decided to make the Fn key the leftmost key in the bottom row. That displaces the frequently-used Ctrl key, which makes using Ctrl-key based editing a royal pain. Basically, the keyboard is going to take some real getting used to.

However, everything else seems fine, and so far it’s passing the burn-in test. And I’ve enjoyed finally having a capable machine again. A good example of that is the fact that I’m writing this entry from my couch rather than my desk. See, the Vaio stopped working off battery power some years ago, so it’s tethered to the AC power outlet at my desk. Just being able to run off battery is an immense gain, but on top of that, even if I shut the Vaio down and moved it to another outlet, I’d lose Internet connectivity because it lacks a wireless LAN card. The StinkPad, of course, comes with wireless networking by default, which is another huge benefit, and the reason why I can post this entry from my couch, or the kitchen, or the bedroom… finally! And let’s not even mention the potential for actually playing DVDs…

So although I’m still taking my time and making sure everything about the new machine is going to work out, so far it’s going well, and I’m pretty happy with the box. Considering how much time I spend on the computer, this should have a very substantial impact upon my quality of life. Happy day!

You would think that a company that values customer service would create a facility whereby, if there’s going to be a wait of greater than ten minutes for telephone support, a customer could disconnect from the queue and call back later and reattach to their place in queue.

Of course, you would also expect that after waiting on hold for 30 minutes, a CSR, upon finding that you’d been sent to the wrong department, wouldn’t transfer you back to the beginning of their own queue for another 30-minute wait to talk to someone else from the exact same wrong department!

I’m presently up to my 11th CSR in trying to get Dell to honor their 21-day “no questions asked” laptop replacement warranty. I’ve spoken with Carla, John, Karthic, Nisha, Shreelakshmi, Abniner, Ryan, Simon, Alice, and Surnath so far…

Truly amazing.