Hello, and a tale of woe

[jiml@strauss.ncrmicro.ncr.com (Jim Lewczyk)]

Hi.  I'm a short-time thinkpad 701C owner, but a longtime laptop owner.  I
tend to buy machines that are fixer-uppers and fix them up.  It's just a hobby
but it's fairly self supporting. 

Over the past year and a half I've owned an ALR Venture, two AST Explorer 
laptops, a Sharp 6220, a Zeos colornote, two Victor 400N laptops and a Panasonic 
C21V.  MOST of these things came, got fixed, and left, generating enough mad 
money for me to look around for the laptop I really wanted, the butterfly.

Well, I found one.  A DX2-50 4M/510Mb 701C (or so the ad said).  The owner had 
been robbed and so the machine did not have any cables or a battery, or the 
mini-docking station.  It did have the floppy drive and it did have the system 
unit itself.  I made a low bid on it and got it.  Then things got... interesting.

The buyer seemed in no hurry to get off the phone and we talked for over an hour,
and he insisted that I use American Express Money Orders, because they can be 
cancelled in the event of fraud and he's never seen a counterfit one.  But then
he also seemed in a hurry to get his money.  He Federal Expressed the machine
to me--too quickly it seemed because I hadn't gone to the bank yet.  Then he 
called to let me know that FedEx couldn't deliver but I could run down to their
office that evening, because he knew how much I wanted the machine.  I laughed
at him "Yeah right.  You just want your money."  He laughed too and admitted it.
His reasons were all sound and despite all the red flags that went up then and
are doubtless going up in your minds out there, he hadn't cheated me.

But wait, there's more.  

Now, this machine didn't have a battery, floppy cable, mini-adaptor or power
supply.  Seems the seller traveled out of the country a lot and he had it with
him on a business trip late last year when someone stole all his accessories 
from his office (the floppy drive was in a drawer, so it wasn't stolen, and he
was using a borrowed NiMH battery at the time).  He raised hell with his boss
who basically told him he didn't want to hear it, go and buy himself a new 
machine.  So he did.  Then, a month later, he was laid off and a month after
that, the office was closed.

So he had this extra machine and needed the money, and that's what I bought.  
I had visions of opening the box to a brick, and was relieved to find that it 
was all intact.  Then I realized that I was unable to test it until I could 
locate a battery and got nervous again.  But I was able to put together a 16V 
bench supply with the proper connector and tried to fire it up.  Nothing.  Hm.  
Before I panicked I sent some email to some people on comp.sys.laptops asking 
if there was some trick to turning it on or if in fact it would even work with-
out a battery installed.  They came back with the well-known fact that the 
switch is REALLY hard to work on a new machine.  I tried again and sure enough, 
it worked!  Not only that, but it was not a DX2-50 machine with 4Mb of RAM, but 
a DX4-75 machine with 8Mb of RAM!  It booted right up... in Portuguese.

Most of the manuals were in Portuguese (I assume, it looks like Spanish to me) 
too so I poked around for a bit until I tired of trying to change the language 
through Windows.  In the ensuing weeks I reloaded the BIOS and deleted all of
the software on the machine and loaded Linux.  I replaced the missing battery 
and floppy cables (but not the mini-dock yet) and was settling in nicely.

There were a few problems I wanted fixed, but I wanted to work with it for a
few weeks to get a complete list:  There was a small crack in the case, the
keyboard was slightly warped, making it necessary to hit the spacebar hard
instead of with the light touch I'm used to as a touch-typist.  520 Mb of 
hard disk was getting decidedly small (for Linux and DOS). 

Then, early this month, I came back to my desk with a cup of coffee and the 
machine had gone nuts.  The screen was flashing off and on and it seemed like
it was attempting to boot over and over.  I hit the power and then when I tried
to cold start it, I get three beeps and it shut off.

Now comes the fun part.  I called IBM about the warrantee and found that this 
machine was not in the US sales database.  Hm, I think, it's probably a South
American machine, since it did have Portuguese loaded.  I called the seller.  
Yes, it was purchased in S. America in Brazil, Rio de Janero he thinks, but it'll
be impossible to get a receipt since the company's gone.  The office he told
me about wasn't in the states, it was in Brazil.  The insurance company he 
worked for had always paid him like a contractor and apparantly they'd never
filed registration or incorporation papers in Brazil so when they closed shop,
they disappeared completely.  He's not even sure he has any kind of legal proof
that he worked for them.  Beyond that, he couldn't help me.  He asked for the
machine, and one day they handed it to him and he used it.  Then he got defensive
and said he had email from me saying I was satisfied with the purchase and that
he was going out of the country again and I wouldn't be able to contact him.
True.  The next day his email bounced.

Here's what I think happened.  He worked for a company that wasn't above getting
the steepest discount they could, that that may have included taking advantage
of stolen street merchandise.  He may have known this but ignored it.  I'm not
aware of many companies that buy laptops for their employees and don't retain
title to the laptops, but he may have felt that since the machine was missing
bits, he could keep it.  The company may well not have cared.  Anyway, he sold it
in good faith, but didn't like me contacting him again and again talking about 
warranty registrations and such because, not only did he probably not have true
title to the machine, but the company he worked for (which he conveniently never
mentioned by name) probably didn't have title to it either.  

Needless to say, IBM never found a sales record for my machine in any of their
databases, including all of them in South America, and has refused me a warranty.
As I tried to push them into giving me all possible options for validating my
machine, one young fellow lambasted me for buying something without a valid 
receipt.

Gee thanks.

The service people were nicer, but they couldn't give me a warranty.  They did
decipher the beep codes and told me which boards needed replacing.  Today I 
called IBM and asked for prices:

lower system board  PN 41H7180 (formerly PN 25H4883) $1140.00
LCD Cover assembly  PN 04H8326 $135.00
Keyboard            PN 04H6917 $151.00

They, unfortunately, do not refund a core-charge or trade-in-value for the old
parts.  The total of these three items, by the way, is more than I paid for the
machine in the first place (before buying replacemnt parts).

So it looks like I'm going to attempt to repair it myself.  I've been here 
before, but it's no fun, and in the meantime I don't have a machine to use,
inexpensive upgrades are showing up, and I'm not sure if I should spend money
on an upgrade (such as a 16Mb RAM card) for a machine that doesn't even work!

There is my tale.  Thanks for listening.  Anybody know how to disassemble
a 701C?

Jim Lewczyk
--
James Lewczyk, Software Engineer    1-970-223-5100 x9471
Symbios Logic, Inc                  At work: jim.lewczyk@Symbios.com
Fort Collins, CO                    At home: jlewczyk@csn.org