Vat of Knowledge

So when I started working in the computer field professionally, back in 1996, I landed a job with one of Toshiba’s 25 premier service centers in the United States, located in Dallas, TX, Quality High Tech Services.  I worked there a couple of years, and specialized in laptop repair.  Who would have known.  I had desktop experience, as I mentioned to them in the interview, but what I ended up doing there, was far from the typical desktop PC arena.

As a premier service center, they had to stock over $100,000 in parts on location for over 5 years to become a certified repair depot.  They followed all the rules and made good money doing so.  Back then, we made $110 for each warranty repair, even if it was to reseat a keyboard connection on a laptop.  Labor rates were $75 per hour in house for laptop repairs (at that time) plus parts.

We were thrown to the dogs repairing laptops when we started.  I was handed a laptop in a bucket in a million pieces and was told to get it back together.  Not knowing how they worked, I had a lot of questions.  Where does this go, how about this, etc?  They wanted to make sure I asked questions, and didn’t ask them repeatedly.  This is how I later trained technicians as well.  You could tell in about 2 to 3 days if they could retain or not.  As a laptop tech, if you don’t already have a photographic memory, you have to be able to develop one, or come up with a system that works for putting everything back together.  One extra screw when you’re done is one too many.  Take it apart and start over and find out where that extra screw goes.  They wouldn’t have put all those screws in there if they weren’t important.  To make matters worse, some of these systems were 10 boards deep, and there were 16 different screw types (thread, length).  Screws had to be exact.  There was no room for error.  Long screws would punch holes in plastic that was irrepairable, or cause a short in the system.  It has to be exact.

That being said, troubleshooting such systems was no easy task either.  At that time, Windows 3.11 was still prevalent, so there were a lot of software related issues.  I would have to say that about 80% of the issues we saw were software or end user related (created) issues.  The other 20% were legitimate hardware issues.  We call them issues rather than problems, because issues can be, and always are, resolvable.  There was no issue we could not fix, unless the manufacturer just stopped providing parts.

We worked on the following list of manufacturers:

• Toshiba (main bread and butter)
• Panasonic
• IBM (for a short time, I’ll explain later)
• NEC
• Texas Instruments (begrudgingly)
• Compaq
• HP
• Hewlitt Packard
• Acer
• Gateway

To name a few.  Dell at that time did all of their repairs in house and did not have “trained technicians” at that time.  In fact, Dell was just starting to get involved in the laptop industry at this time, and Toshiba beat them hands down as far as design and functionality was concerned.  This has really changed in current times.  IBM was another manufacturer that had problems.  They gave us tools to work on their laptops to remove screws, say from the front of the keyboard, that were barely visible to the human eye.  It got to be so frustrating with them, including being reimbursed for warranty work, that we stopped supporting IBM at that time.

A word of advice concerning warranty that holds true to this day.  Always get the manufacturer warranty, or extended warranty.  Never go with the CompUSA (they’re not even around anymore), Best Buy or other third party extended warranty.  You think Best Buy techs know how to work on laptops?  They simply don’t.  They end up shipping these “problem” laptops to another company that can handle it, and I’ve worked for those companies too on the back end.  And they don’t know what they’re doing either.  Gone is the day of a specialized service center, but laptops are just about disposable anyway at this point.

Advice on a new laptop, and what to buy?  That all depends on your needs.  Most manufacturers have improved on their design, but things to watch for are cheap laptops with cheap parts in them.  Celeron processors vs. true Pentium is one area where they skimp.  If you want performance, make sure the hard drive has higher RPM’s.  Most laptops back in that time, and current times are 4200 and 5400 RPM, respectively.  7200 RPM is becoming more prevalent, and I’ve even seen 10,000 RPM.  These days SATA laptop drives are also a good choice.  The display can make a difference.  Refresh rates, native resolution, and display type all come into consideration.  RAM speeds also make a difference.  Does it support DDR2 or DDR3?  DDR indicates an older system, or a skimpy system.  Make sure you get a DVD burner as well.  The main thing about choosing your laptop is warranty options.  Dell has a great warranty, and they will send someone onsite with parts in their hand to fix your issue.  If you extend your warranty, do it through Dell. I actually lean toward an IBM (Lenovo) laptop these days.  They’ve improved the design greatly, their warranty is exceptional, and they are rugged.  They also have biometrics, as well as lo-jack for anti-theft and laptop recovery.  The pain in the ass about IBM is reloading the operating system.  They usually have a utility partition for doing this that makes it faster, but I image a lot of my software loads to make it faster, with Ghost or Acronis.  The only way it can be imaged on an IBM is using Acronis, and the new hard drive has to be inside the Thinkpad while imaging so that the drive geometry can be set up while imaging it.  Usually imaging from an external USB drive is the best way to accomplish this.

Again, most of the issues we saw were software related.  So we had spare hard drives that had factory software loads, for each laptop model, in order to break the issue in half.  If it worked with a known good software load, it was obviously a software issue, otherwise it was hardware.  We also had a Novell server that hosted ghost images of the software load for that particular machine, so that we could reload the systems.  This was, of course, a last resort, unless the customer requested it.  We always fixed issues, removed virus, configured PCMCIA card and socket services, etc, where we could before resorting to a software reload.  Software reload was not covered by Toshiba warranty, and since we made more $$ on a warranty repair, we would do the software reload, and also put in something hardware related that we did, in order to collect on the warranty repair.  This was a win/win situation, since we didn’t have to charge the customer, and the company made more for the repair.

After some time, I moved up to lead technician, and we hired junior techs to get the work done.  As did my buddy, Bobby, and Ken.  Ken was a real piece of work.  So now there were 6 techs, each with a team color.  We were blue team, Bobby was red team (I believe) and Ken’s team was yellow, I think.  We were always trying to out do one another in production numbers.  So it came to a point that we were pulling 10 hour days to get the work done.  First thing in the morning, we had to check the status of all of our machines and make sure where they were.  We had about 100 machines in our queue at any given point.  The rest of the day, we fielded many end user phone calls about their status, and worked with customers face to face in the lobby.  We also tried to help our techs with issues that were a bit more difficult, and at the end of the day, for the last two hours, we performed triage.  Bobby and I had a contest to see how many machines we could diagnose in one hour.  I think my number was 119, and he triaged 123.  That was to diagnose the machine, order parts if necessary, and change the status in our software system.

The thing is this.  Ken was a cherry picker.  He would always grab machines that were clearly under warranty.  This made ordering parts a piece of cake, no phone call to the customer with a parts/labor quote, and the big thing, you had to be spot on with the diagnosis, you couldn’t just shotgun the machine.  Ken was also a quirky little sucker.  He was always joking like “hey, what makes you the egg-spurt” and crap like that, and he would laugh at his own little wise cracks that were about as stupid as a screen door on a submarine.  Bobby almost threw down and had a fight with him one day.  We always plotted how we were going to invite him over to a network party (LAN party) and greet him at the door with a baseball bat and beat the crap out of him.  So instead, we just started calling him Satan.  We even asked Carl if it was ok if we called him Satan, and in his Texas accent he said “I don’t see a problem with it”.  So it began, the Satan jokes.  Ross would stop by his cubicle wailing “Runnin with the devil…”.  Even Wally, our older onsite technician would stop by and in his little gremlin voice say “Oh, evil one…”  Ronnie jumped in with some Satanic jokes that I can’t recall at the moment, but you get the picture.  Ken got tired of it pretty quick and we were instructed to stop.  Still, I would call Ken’s extension (before caller ID), and listen to him pick up “Hello?  Hello? Dammit, why do I keep getting these calls?”  as we’d laugh our asses off in the next cubicle.  That went on beyond employment at QHT.  I would call in to his extension and leave him uttering the same thing “Hello? HELLO!”

What an experience.  We learned a lot, and we had a lot of fun, and we formed friendships that last to this day.  Also worked with Ronnie, and still talk with Bobby and Ronnie to this day.  I went on to work with other companies that performed laptop repair and helped to train technicians everywhere I went.  Worked for CompUSA for a short time, and those guys wouldn’t listen to me, though I knocked out all the laptops in their cage with a quickness.  They simply didn’t want to learn.