Thursday, 20 July 2006


For a while things were going very well. The flight was good and I had a great weekend with friends here in California. Yesterday I went to IBM Almaden and had a lot of fun giving my talk and talking to some of the IBM researchers. There's some really cool Web-related, Firefox-related stuff going on there.

Then tragedy struck. Last night my laptop mysteriously died. It simply fails to boot with a "Fan Error". IBM's service people are shipping me a box with which I can ship it to them to be fixed. I have no idea if they'll actually be able to fix it and get it back to me before I leave California on Sunday. If not, I'm not sure what I'll do. I wonder why I can't take it somewhere to get it fixed quicker. The timing is terrible; it's significantly harder for me to get work done without it. I can however still meet up with people so I'll try to make the best of it.

I did have a good day today at the Mozilla Foundation offices, talking to people about a wide variety of things, and putting some faces to old names. I'm looking forward to more of that tomorrow.


  1. Oof! That sucks.
    Does that mean I should check your fix for in?

  2. Should have asked if they can just send you a replacement fan unit, so you could swap it out yourself, it's not to bad (pretty much remove the keyboard, and palmrest, then the fan unit that sits on the mobo). Another option is to upgrade to onsite repair (or go to a repair center nearby). May pay a little more, but should be quicker.

  3. I can sympathize. My Toshiba Satellite has been, for months now, making a horrendous sound whenever the fan went. A couple of weeks it got really annoying so I opened it to see what part of the fan was grinding agains something.
    When I opened it, I found that there is some kind of copper contraption that connects the CPU to the fan "exhaust". It seems to me that the overall length of that copper arm has shrinked over the years.
    Anyway,after closing up the laptop, I started seeing some "colling system failure" problems. When running Linux, th suytem just shuts down because of this issue. During my vacation, I need to get it serviced.
    In the meantime, I can only use the laptop on a corner table with a SuperTech-type fan blowing on the CPU constantly.
    No fun.

  4. Robert O'Callahan20 July 2006 at 20:57

    Martijn: you should always feel free to check in any of my approved patches :-)
    Robert: Actually I just tried to upgrade to onsite service, but they can't send a tech because apparently they don't have necessary parts in stock anywhere in the USA. Hard to believe... I think I'm just going to hang on to the laptop and keep calling them until the parts are in stock and I can schedule an onsite visit wherever I happen to be.

  5. Robert, nice chatting with you today. Looks like I don't have an email address for you. In any event, something I forgot to ask you about was this place: I thought you might know something about them.

  6. I know what that's like... I had a similar experience with ibm... if you want the dirt on that, just send me an email.
    They did take care of me... but it took a while, and a lot of frustration. But in the end, they made up for it.
    Just be vigilant and keep calling.

  7. Could have been worse, see ;-)