Canon's not so bad; I've got a Texas Instruments laptop (yes, I said laptop, not calculator, though I have one of those too). They only made computers for a year or two and then sold the business to Acer, who has no motivation for responding promptly at all. I spent a week in email tag with a service person of theirs last year trying to find a replacement power supply when mine died. (This is oddly parallel to Jan's story, I'm realizing, except my computer's a laptop).

And then there was the whole nail-polish-bottle-on-the-function-key episode for a few months there.

-- Anonymous, May 09, 2000

Answers

Christ, I don't even want to talk about my computer right now. We got the power supply in last night, but unfortunately all the jostling that we did while taking out the old one and replacing the new one seems to have been ultra-destructive to the already-fragile hard drive.

When I booted up, I couldn't even use the start menu without causing Explorer to puke and die, so then I shut down and rebooted into Scandisk, which promptly found over a hundred new bad sectors (which is not to mention the 200+ bad sectors that I had before).

At this point I'm just hoping to be able to salvage a few files that I don't have backed up anywhere else, before we junk the thing for good.

-- Anonymous, May 10, 2000

I shudder to think what will happen to my friend's Commodore 64 when it finally dies. No replacment parts for that relic.

-- Anonymous, May 17, 2000