Those may well be the two sweetest words in Technical Support. Under Warranty. Anything that fails under warranty can conveniently be sent out for repair in exchange for a loaner service unit so you get minimal downtime. Some companies don’t even bother to repair a failed unit, they just ship you a new one. American Power Corporation (APC) does that with their UPS products, and Iomega with their storage solutions. Some systems even come with a lifetime warranty, like the HP networking switches. Bust one port on an HP 8- 24- or 48-port switch and they ship you a whole new unit, even if your unit is 5 years old.

One of my best experiences about warranty is the IBM Thinkpad’s 3-year warranty. Our office issue Thinkpads have in their third year of warrantly had suffered one minor form of failure: The R40’s display would every now and then become garbled, The T40’s LCD cover when moved would cause the display to disappear, and my T42’s fan just quit. In all cases, our supplier Technopaq had taken in the laptops and arranged for a new system board for each. I still have two more years to go on the warranty on the T42, but both the R40 and the T40 were on their final months of warranty. Getting a new board for them is almost like getting a new machine.

So my T42 (well, technically not MINE but the company’s, but no one else gets to use it but me, so there) is in the shop. It’s been there since Thursday. They have the system board on stock so I should be seeing it again middle of next week after tests and all, almost as good as new.

Which means, I have an excuse NOT to work this weekend.

He he he.