SPONSORED LINKS
To recap, there were four problems. Not my fault: lid cracked, battery wouldn't stay in. My fault: lower case cracked, keyboard partially detached. IBM refused to fix any of it under warranty. I decided to pay the $516 to get everything except the upper lid fixed. $195 for the lower case, $151 for the keyboard, $175 for shipping and labor (flat rate). It turns out the battery latches to the lower case, not the motherboard, so in essence I'm paying to fix everything I broke. I'm still pissed that they won't fix the top lid, and I'm not sure how any future damage to it will be handled (if its true as someone else wrote me that the lids are extremely vulnerable to cracking). I'm also disappointed prices for spare parts seem to be based on the $4799 price the TP701 was originally introduced at, not the recent discount prices. Answering a few questions following my original post: The loose battery wasn't impairing my work because I was running the machine off AC. It was useless as a portable with the loose battery, other than my being able to bring the machine out to a field site (a ship) with less hassle than a desktop. The crack on the lid is on the right hand side, not between the keyboard and the LCD. I noticed it immediately when I got it back from the previously repair because that's where I hold it to pick the Pad up. Before I sent it, the Pad had felt sturdy as a rock. After I got it back, I felt a distinct pop as the crack allowed the part of the lid to expand past its mounting. I had no problems with speed or courtesy of service (with one exception). My gripe was that my experience with past repairs led me to believe IBM was operating under the principle that "the customer is always right." Well, they didn't believe me when I told them some of the damage wasn't my fault. End of story. In the previous EZ-Serv, the main problem was a hard drive failure while repartitioning. The rep I spoke with was almost hostile with me. I spent five minutes trying to convince him that it's OK for users to repartition the hard drive, which shouldn't subsequently fail. He gave me an EZ-Serv number with the ominous warning (in a threatening tone) "But if they find something on the hard drive to indicate you did something improper, they will charge you for it." I also tried to get my 750's battery replaced last month. The rep dug through his notes and determined the 750's battery was only covered for one year. That was news to me since the Thinkpad ads back then had never mentioned this. I searched through the owner's manual and lo-and-behold he was right. Given they replaced a battery without questions just six months prior (nearly 2 years after my original purchase) and my other recent experiences and you see why I think IBM is tightening their liberal repair policies. All this has led me to wonder. All my EZ-Servs with my TP750 have been in 48 hours or less. They were at the North Carolina repair facility. All my TP701 EZ-Servs have been at Tennessee, and have taken about a week (in the most recent repair, 3 days before they notified me there was a problem, 2 more days after I agreed to pay to fix it). Is IBM servicing the top-of-the-line 75x/76x machines better than the 3xx/5xx/70x? I want to get to the bottom of this before I take Thinkpads off my "highly recommended" list. IBM's service is what made the difference to me. -- John H. Kim There are only two industries that call their jokim@mit.edu customers 'users,' and one of them is illegal.