Thank you RBS, I am comfortable doing it and have highly qualified technicians who work for our organization who perform POS ( parts only service ) in house daily for other vendor products. Me doing or getting them to help is easy.
Also getting the hinges ( new one ) from Chinese sellers on ebay seems to be lot cheaper than getting it from IBM parts.
Probably the warranty will remain valid as you say, but there is no guarantee that the warranty will cover something else in future or a different type of problem. If it is only me who has a broken hinge arising from a loose hinge problem, I can live with it and say may be its an exception. May be a poll would help to figure out statistically what % of T61 users feel the same way.
My only concern / point of contention is: Warranties are supposed to cover product defects arising from poor design and manufacturing.
I went ahead and paid for the additional warranty when there were no problems with the machine ( one of the reasons to extend my warranty was the bad nvidia chip problem, never know when it would show up !). This way I have peace of mind and not worry about looking up parts etc., I never had hinge failures on any previous models 600E's, T30's, T4X and a (T60p which I am typing on right now).
Again I am using the T61 machine for work, not as a gaming laptop or for something else which would stress or fail components on it. Laptop was never dropped, never lifted it up with one hand, never pulled it from one corner etc. I got an exception to continue to use a thinkpad, when our organization moved to Dell, now to HP. Co workers always like the NMB keyboard, the professional look without the bells and whistles, motion sensor etc. and have influenced many of them to buy thinkpads over time for their home (esp after lenovo took over and prices dropped 1600 --> 1100 ).
Now more and more organizations are moving to apple, even in the professional environment, not sure what type problems they have. But haven't heard many complaints. I was talking to our Cisco sales rep at a party yesterday, he mentioned Cisco now gives it employees a choice between a Thinkpad and Apple. So now it is not 100% Thinkpads like before.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=298735 , this seems to suggest they fix even cosmetic damages for out of warranty machines when it is a known problem. The idea of being able to drop it and getting it repaired in 30 mins is amazing.
I am confident that other T61 ( or other SMB model ) users face / have faced the same loose hinge problem.
My sincere suggestion to fellow TP'ers is if you notice any loose hinge problem is to send it in right away for service. Even if that means sending it every 2 weeks for the same problem over and over again. Looseness of hinge is something many people can live with and probably would, but when it fails you don't want to be stuck like me.
Have been loyal for 8 years because of IBM brand and service. But the same IBM service is messed up now. The way I see it is, it is not Lenovo's fault from a service perspective, Lenovo has the responsibility in the design piece. Unless Lenovo has handed down some internal memo's instructing what to do on service.
Once the call is made it is all IBM employees doing the stuff still and they are the ones dropping the ball here. It is difficult to imagine these are the same IBM employees who worked on service until 2007 or 2008. Either IBM outsourced / sub contracted the work or the good employees moved on. The current IBM employees seem to lack the cognition abilities, to decipher what is right from wrong or the moral character to stand for what is right. Majority of the service mess up's or unsatisfied customers are arising from the service people handling the cases.
If it is Lenovo which passed down such instructions to deal with products then the whole brand is to blame instead of a few rotten apples.
Was on the verge of replacing my T43 with a T420 beginning of next month. It on hold right now because I am not sure what type of support I would get if I face a problem with it 1 year down the line where I cannot return the machine and have no recourse.
RealBlackStuff wrote:With the help of
the HMM it;s a matter of less than an hour to fix that problem.
And if you are careful (i.e. don't cause any scratches), your warranty will still remain valid.