Sigh. This is just not my year, it seems…

This morning I finally got my laptop back from repairs, however… The cardboard box was all taped over with “Resealed by the Mail Service” indicating the box had not had a safe journey through the mail system.

Oh, well – I thought – the laptop itself was neatly tucked away inside tons of air-filled foam, it should be safe. But of course it wasn’t. When I tried to boot it up, the exact same failure as when I sent it in for repairs (no BIOS screen, four beeps at bootup) was still present.

I immidiately sent an email to the shop who did the repairs – only to be told “Please send it in for repairs again”. Sigh. Yet another two or three weeks without a laptop/development machine? Why couldn’t they have sent the laptop marked “Handle with Care”?

This is clearly not my year.

About two weeks ago, my otherwise trusty IBM ThinkPad X31 laptop started acting weird: it froze at random, threw kernel oopses and otherwise locked up hard. Occationally, it even refused booting – showing nothing but a black screen at power on. After being able to reproduce these problems under execution of simple applications such as memtest86+ I saw no other solution other than to send in my laptop for repairs.

This is rather unfortunate, as the laptop is also my primary (and only) Gentoo development box. Although I quickly managed to get my Soekris net4801 set up with mail client (You may congratulate me; I’ve switched from Evolution to Mutt due to this) etc, its 266MHz pentium-mmx class CPU – an NSC Geode SC1100 – is not very well suited for any major development.

Going on second week, my X31 is still at the shop for repairs. Hopefully I will soon hear from them – and have my main development box back. Until then, non-critical updates and bug fixes on the packages I maintain may be a little slower than usual…