So, my Thinkpad T42 started having serious video issues a few weeks before I flew back to Jersey. Some cursory research pointed at motherboard issues. Fortunately, my machine is under warranty for a while yet, so I filed a service request with IBM. This worked quite well, with a turnaround time of 11 days, including two major holidays and weekends.

Needless to say, I was pretty happy to have my beloved Thinkpad back this afternoon. Until I booted it... and got display failures again. This appears to be more definitively a backlight issue, which does mean I can use the machine with an external monitor, as opposed to the lockups it experienced before. Still, IBM's tech people really should have caught the issue, since it was covered in my initial issue report. Estimated return time for this repair? Wednesday.

Overall, I could not be happier with IBM tech support, turnaround time is really good, they ask no questions about things like missing hard drives, and the call center I've dealt with is in Atlanta. Still, the issues I'm having with this machine are... unsettling given it's only a couple of years old.

Posted on 2009-01-26, 19:29 0 Comments so far.