If you direct a customer with a valid warranty to a local certified Lenovo service center instead of doing the ship-to-depot do-si-do, you should also inform the customer the service center is going to charge $90.00 to work on their laptop so said customer is fully informed of the consequences of their decision.

Grumpily surprised,
   Lenovo User

Dell’s case designs have been getting better and better over the years, but it looked like they’d shot themselves in the foot trying to make the T5500 case smaller.  I figured I could eliminate the fold out hard drive tray completely by putting the drive in the slot for the floppy drive.  After removing the hard drive from the tray, a very easy screw-less operation, I found that the section of the drive tray interfering with the GTX 285 could be removed!  Dell was more clever with their design than I thought.  I put the drive in the other section of the hard drive tray, unscrewed the conflicting part, and the drive tray folded down into place perfectly, leaving the full-size double-width GTX 285 card clear with the power connectors easily reachable.

Thank you, Dell, for thinking ahead!

I never expected to find myself feeling monitor envy at my dad, of all people.  I’m the computer geek in the family, dangit!  He’s training to do stock trading and decided he needed more screen to get all the information he wants at his fingertips.  About a month ago, he went out and bought the equipment he needed and this is the result:

He’s using a Matrox TripleHead2Go device to drive the three extra monitors and built the stand holding the monitors himself.  I think he used 1″ square steel tubing.

I now officially have monitor envy for my dad!

I sat down in the gate area, took the notebook out, and looked it over.  The back left corner is cracked and the main chassis has a slight arc now along the back edge.  With a deep breath, I opened the lid and watched it come out of sleep mode!  Keyboard and trackpad worked, but it wouldn’t find any wireless networks available at all.  Feeling sick, I packed it up again and got ready to board my flight thinking that I was going to have to repair this laptop or buy a USB wireless dongle just one month before buying a new laptop.   How bad is that.

My flight from Atlanta to Raleigh-Durham went quickly, helped by the new XM radio system available on the flight.  At home, I did a full shutdown/reboot of the laptop and the wireless system came back to life!  This afternoon, I downloaded the hardware service manual, disassembled the main chassis as far as I could, vacuumed out all the cat hair (yeesh!) and reassmbled it.  This removed the curve from the rear of the chassis and everything is working well again.

I’m virtually certain had I been carrying a Dell notebook yesterday I would have found it in parts in my backpack.  They just don’t have the same rugged quality as Thinkpads.  I don’t know about Toshiba or HP notebooks.  I look forward to the new Lenovo ThinkPad T61p I’m planning on buying very soon.