Did I tell you about my wife’s laptop? I bet I haven’t.

The spot in which you plug the power supply into became loose and as a result, the battery could not get charged.

I get online and chatted with Dell Support, I find that chatting in less frustrating than speaking on the phone with them. e established that she probably needed a new system board, that the laptop was out of warranty and that a new system board would cost 800 bucks.

My wife needs a laptop to do her job. It didn’t take much to justify buying a new one instead of shelling out that kind of money on parts.

This left this laptop in my house, that had nothing wrong with it except that it couldn’t draw power. I decided that I could fix it. And since no one was counting on using it now, there was no problem if I screwed it all up. It looked like I could just re-solder the power jack. And I was ready to do just that until we got a letter in the mail.

The letter said that we members of a class that had secured a victory from Dell for this very problem. In light of this law suit, Dell was very willing to replace the system board at no cost to us. We sent the laptop off and in a week or so it came back.

It sat for a few weeks while I was busy with other things. This week I decided that I was ready to mess with it. I wanted to install Kubuntu on it. I put the install CD in and turned the laptop on and… nothing happened. It seems that the CD Drive no longer worked.

Once again I chatted with Dell. He had me run Dell Diagnostics on the laptop. The diagnostics said the Hard Drive was failing, but the CD Drive was fine. Go figure. He said he would send me a new CD/DVD drive and a new hard drive. The sad thing part is that I don’t think there is anything wrong with the CD/DVD drive. I think it’s the system board. But there is no arguing. I’ll get the new parts, install them and if when the new CD/DVD drive also doesn’t work, I’ll chat with them again.

I can’t complain, I’m getting a lot of service for free on a laptop that was out of warranty.