my laptop is back

Yesterday I got my laptop back. It was in service since the 6th of December.

They replaced the battery, and although it looked like the built-in charge indicator was defect, actually the button on this battery is buried deeper than it was on the previous one and I have to press really hard on it to trigger it.

According to the tests made yesterday night, this battery holds for about 2.5-3 hours when playing music. Also it has 96% of its designed capacity. I guess is OK enough since I don't want to be spared from my laptop anymore.

Next on the agenda:

• restore data sanity (I did clean up most of the data from the HDD before handing down the laptop for the case when I was forced to hand it over; lucky for me, I managed to keep the HDD)
• install armel Debian on my new[1] NSLU2, Kinder (more news on that later ;-) )
• fix my local network chaos triggered by the problems that hit Ritter (my older NSLU2)
  
• finish the wiki theme
• work a little more on svn-buildpackage and kill more of its bugs
• walk through my (game) packages' bugs and try to fix them, answer, etc.
• try to make bluetooth transfers to work from and to my laptop

BTW, I still hold to my opinion that Dell and Emag suck, although I might buy desktops from Dell, laptops are a no-no until they fix their broken batteries and their broken "1-year warranty for batteries" policy.

[1] I bought a new NSLU2 after I left my laptop in service and it has been waiting since then to run the Debian Arm EABI (armel) port

I am laptop-less, but disk-ful

Today I went for the second time[1] to emag's service[2] to have my laptop's[*] battery replaced since it was powering the laptop only for 15 (yes, fifteen) minutes. This after only 11 months since I bought the laptop[**].

I didn't observed this drastic reduction until recently (last time I remember was about 1 hour and 50 minutes, back in August), because I wasn't so mobile since August.

To make the long story short, I had to: wait, wait, argue, wait, argue, talk normally to the manager, wait, wait, argue, argue, observe sheer contempt from the personal when I asked again for the manager, talked normally to the manager, left after 4-5 hours wasted (+2 yesterday).

All this just to be able to keep my data safe by holding on to my hard disk, since they insisted they wanted the whole laptop[3], and making them write on the warranty receipt they were the ones who pulled out the HDD (I might be over-cautious/paranoid, but I wouldn't trust emag with the garbage bin).


Now I am on a forced vacation away from Debian for an undefined time, although I might be able to send mails and do make small patches from work.


Hey, emag:

• teach your employees to behave properly like the manager did! (I don't remember her name, sorry, I'm really bad with names)
• you'd better redirect clients with broken hardware to the actual services instead of acting like a useless buffer when is clear you're over your heads
• simple and obvious defects like it was in my case (I could have proven it in exactly 15 minutes) should be handled with minimum impact for the client, for example, keep the faulty battery, but let me take home the laptop
  

[*] Dell Inspiron 6400 / E1505
[**] when I think the long battery time was one of the most important points, it looks ridiculous now to have such a bad degradation in such a short time

[1] first was yesterday, but due to some support person's incompetence I had to postpone - I asked two questions, they gave me two wrong answers
[2] after all this I wouldn't recommend emag to anyone
[3] You might ask why would they need the whole laptop for a clear 'battery is broken' complaint? Apparently "the service can't test the batteries without the laptop". They probably have neither any spare laptops nor dedicated equipment to measure batteries.