On Tuesday my Thinkpad was taken for service to fix the problem described in this post.
The problems I described were overheating, wear on the keyboard (from a minimum of 8 hours a day 7 days a week use) and a missing rubber foot on the base. The statement of work includes a replaced system-board, keyboard, CPU fan, and “cover(s)” (not that I can see any difference in that regard). No new rubber foot. Also they upgraded the BIOS.
It’s interesting to note that in the list of “diagnostics performed” they listed “HDD” – of course I removed the hard drive before giving it to them.
Anyway 2 days turn-around is pretty good service and I’ll ask them to post me a new rubber foot so I can stick it on myself.
Update:
The IBM support team were quite helpful about this and now have a set of misc small parts being couriered to me – it may arrive tomorrow or Monday.
It’s a minor annoyance that they didn’t fix everything when they had it, but shipping me a set of small parts is great service. With a bit of luck I’ll get some other parts that will be useful to me at some future time too. ;) My Thinkpad leaves warranty in a few months and I’ll be on my own for all future repairs.
For the first time I am actually considering paying for extra warranty support. I think that I’m one of the more expensive IBM customers in terms of warranty support. I typically go through one keyboard and one system-board per Thinkpad that I own. I guess that IBM make the most money from managers who have laptops always sitting on their desk. People like me who take their laptops everywhere, use them extensively, and wear things out (doing what laptops are designed to do) would be less profitable.