After the hard drive on my laptop died last month, I received the new hard drive, reinstalled everything, copied all of my data over from the external drive, and got back up and running.

Then last week, the screen died. It still works when I plug it into a monitor, and if I shine a light on the screen, I can still see the shapes of the windows, so I was pretty sure the backlight for the LCD screen had died. This time, the support staff got on the same page pretty quickly once I explained the symptoms. I was even off the phone in less than an hour!

The one bit where they tried to be stupid was that they said that when they took the laptop back for service, they would wipe the hard drive. I’m like “Um, you just need to replace a bulb – what does that have to do with the hard drive?” They said “It’s procedure – we have to do a full system test, so that involves wiping the hard drive.” I argued with them for a while and was able to convince them to let me remove my hard drive and keep it here rather than have to reinstall everything once again just for their procedures. So what happens now is they send me a box, I pack the laptop up (minus the hard drive), ship it back to them, they fix it, and then send it back to me.

Man, if I hadn’t bought that extended warranty, I’d so be buying a new laptop now. But at this point, I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth from that warranty between the hard drive and the new screen.