I don't own any Compaq products, but I do own 3 IBM ThinkPad laptops. I've never given warranties a whole lot of concern, until I had the LCD in my "big" laptop start acting up. It's a TP770ED, with 14.1" 1024x768 LCD, 8.1GB, DVD, 128MB, yada yada yada. I've had it for about 2 years now.

About a year ago, the LCD started acting up. It would start strobing on and off, on a 1/2 second interval or so. Also, the battery wasn't charging. I *finally* got around to calling IBM to get it fixed.

I talked to this woman named Diane, who was great. She gets the model numbers of the unit. Asks about the battery FRU number, tells me the one I have has problems, they'll Airborne me a new one, even though it's out of warranty ("We're just replacing them all"). They Airborne me a shipping box for the laptop. Next day, the boxes show up, I pack the old battery and the laptop, drive by Airborne (it was on the way somewhere). All the stickers and everything are pre-printed. All I have to do is put checkmarks on the form for the laptop inventory (I didn't ship the drive, it has too much proprietary info on it).

5 days later (3 working days, just as advertised), my lappy-top comes back, all nicely fixed. About my *only* complaint is one corner of the cover wasn't fully snapped down. Took me 10 seconds to fix it.

I'm told that other laptop manufacturers have similiar service policies. Maybe so. All I know is that I'd cheerfully buy another IBM laptop, simply because of the service. I could have had the thing fixed a year ago, but I was too slack. Now I regret the time I spent cursing the display blinking on and off on me.

As far as drivers, I haven't tried to install Linux on the 770ED. Linux is running fine on my 755Cx, but I don't use the sound, and I'm not running X. It's simply a firewall, with 2 PCMCIA ethernet cards in it. The drivers for the 770ED are very extensive for NT 4.0 and Win2K, which is what I run it. Recovery disks are free for the asking, as long as you can demonstrate the right to ownership of W95 or NT (depending on how you ordered the laptop). Frankly, that seems reasonable to me. Their net support is quite good, and the forums they run *generally* get correct answers to people fairly quickly.

All in all, IBM rocks.

--Chris

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