After selling my old Acer notebook to my brother in April, I have been relying on my aging iBook for my day to day computing needs. My wife has also been using the iBook for her university projects. This had led to various issues and time constraints which has had a serious affect on my productivity.

To combat this affect, I decided to invest in a brand new Lenovo ThinkPad about a month ago. The main aim of using the ThinkPad, was to aide my online money making ventures. I think it has had the opposite result though. The switch from OS X to windows XP has been a nightmare for me and the “cherry on top” is that my brand new notebook seems to be dying a slow painful death.

About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that the screen had developed 2 dead pixels. While these were annoying, they didn’t affect me too much. I also noticed that the screen was getting unusually hot. Even though, I wasn’t subjecting the notebook to any really processor or graphics intensive tasks. When I booted up the notebook last night, I noticed that the amount of dead pixels have no multiplied to about 12. This has now become a problem, being in Thailand and not speaking much of the language has led to even more problems. The store I bought it from simply referred me to the Lenovo helpline; they in turn referred me to a service centre consultant who can not speak any English.

Well it looks like my weekend will be spent personally visiting the IBM service centre and using a series of hand gestures to explain the problem. Oh, what joy…