Dead Backlighting Update

Well, the backlighting on the Thinkpad is still dead. That’s the short form.

Long form is this: I’ve got an old 14″ monitor set up on the breakfast table at home (and let me mention how entertaining it was to reset the resolution on the PC to that, nearly blind, when I found that it was limited to 1024×768, repeating same to reset City of Heroes to a lower rez, too).

IBM has been contact, since the notebook is still under warranty until November. Their brilliant solution is to ship the machine back to them, to be returned in [insert meaningless commitment date here].

I still have the other “perma-loaner” Thinkpad, the T40. I could do it — but, damn, I really don’t want to migrate everything to another machine, reinstall all the aps, struggle with the settings, etc., just to go back again in 2-3 weeks. Gack.

Can’t requisition another company notebook for at least another year. We’re on a 4-year “refresh if you can justify it” cycle, and this is Year 3.

Might be able to take it down to a local IBM authorized repair center to do whatever IBM did last time, except that (a) nobody has a record of what they did last time, and (b) the person who had those records was let go from our help desk back in January (shortly after my machine returned last time) and deleted all his records and paperwork on the way out (the bastard).

Our procurement person is trying to talk our IBM account rep into just replacing the damned machine, which would still mean a migration (unless the HDD and boot image were compatible), but would be (God willing) the last one for a while. Stop me if you’ve heard that one before …

Stay tuned. Hope I don’t have to travel any time soon.