begin quoting David M. Cook as of Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 10:56:52AM -0700: > On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 05:00:54PM -0700, Lan Barnes wrote: > > > I _always_ buy an extended warranty that covers everything including the > > screen. Laptop repairs can rival the cost of a new machine. > > That would be my strong recommendation as well. Laptops have timers in them > that make them go bad the first day out of warranty. I would only skip the > extended warranty if the machine gets only light use, but that doesn't > describe how any of us use our machines.
My Apple Powerbooks' battery went from the proverbial 5 hours to 70-80 minutes (after reconditioning) within a year. This was "within design specifications", so no joy. The extended (applecare) warranty recently expired... my laptop is over three years old, now... and I suspect that the battery has finally dipped below an hour uptime. If I leave the laptop sleeping with a full charge, the next day it's at 50-70% charge. Apparently I managed to get the battery as designed by a profit-minded engineer: don't actually _fail_ until after warranty. (Oddly enough, I just had a similiar problem with a Saturn... 39 months, and the battery suddenly registers at 6.4 volts. OEM batteries have a warranty of 36 months... Talk about exact timing.) > Dell actually did work under warranty on my 8200 even though it was a week > past the warranty expiration, so at least their customer service was pretty > good IME. That's good to hear. -Stewart "Probably ought to purchase a replacement battery soon" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
