First, let me say this. The 3 year System Guard
First, let me say this. The 3 year System Guard warranty proved to be a worthwhile investment today.
Now, on to the story. Last week I went to insert my Sprint PCS Vision card into the PC card slot only to find that I couldn't. Something seemed to be jamming the door. No idea how this happened as I only use it rarely and then when I'm traveling, which I hadn't done in months.
At any rate, I called Toshiba and that call went fine. I had two options, send it in for repair or take it to an authorized service center. Turns out there is one about 50 miles from my house so I decided to go that route. I called and set up an appointment for this morning.
On arrival, they took a look at the problem, said that it could be easy or hard, depending on whether or not any of the pins on the PC slot were damaged. Puzzled as to how this happened I let them go ahead and take a more detailed look and sure enough there was some pin damage. This necessitated a mother board replacement, which they did.
On firing up the computer things went a bit haywire. The boot up sequence took well over five minutes and a number of utilities were reporting errors and cancelling out.
I check system properties and the processor was listing a speed of 598mhz, not the 1.5 that it normally did and got the tech back out.
He brought out another M200 and we swapped harddrives in the two machines. The newer machine with my hard drive booted up just fine and everything seemed normal. With a sigh he admitted that they probably had a bad mother board and took it back to the bench.
After a wait, he brought it back, we fired it up and everything seemed fine. PC slot was working everything seemed to be operating, until I noticed that the wireless light was not on. I checked the switch and it was frozen in the ON position and wouldn't move. The tech took it back made an adjustment and now I'm back home with the unit working fine with a new mother board.
Quite an experience. If there are any morals to the story here they are.
If you aren't using a part of your system for awhile and are anticipating doing so, check ahead of time before you start the project. I was prepping to head out of town which prompted me to check out the PCS vision card. I have no idea how the card slot could have been damaged in the first place.
Make sure you back up regularly and definately before sending things in for service. As things were going weird I was thanking my lucky stars.
Know your system! When I first rebooted and said this doesn't look right the guy at the counter, (not the tech who did the work) gave me all kinds of goofball answers. "It's only slow because you are on batteries." "With a new motherboard it takes about six boots to get things back to normal." "All those Toshiba utilities aren't really necessary are they?" "It's reading 598 instead of 1.5 because it's on battery."
Remember you only get the service you demand. I asked to speak to the tech and he came out and spent the rest of the adventure figuring things out with me. The guy at the counter was a loser. I listened to him give several other customers with other problems really bad or incomplete advice.
If you take your system in as I did, don't be leery of firing the system up and putting it through it's paces before leaving the service center.
I lost the better part of a day off dealing with this problem but if I hadn't known about my system I could have lost more time.
