My warranty odyssey

In February I sent my laptop in to be serviced. The hard drive was failing, and the LCD screen backlight was turning off at random. When I bought the laptop in 2005 I got a 3-year warranty to go with it. The warranty was expensive, but I didn't want to have to worry about technical problems during school. The company that does the work under my warranty is called CyberTest, and I had some good experiences with them in the past. This time, however, was different.

I got the laptop back at the end of February, but they hadn't fixed the backlight problem. I wasn't too worried at the time because my spring break was about to start, which would give me time to have it sent in and serviced with minimal interruption to work and school. However, it took CyberTest nearly two weeks to send me the prepaid UPS box, and by that point spring break was long since over. I sent it in nonetheless, and the company sent it back a week later without fixing the problem. They had even called me about and I gave them meticulous instructions as to what was wrong and how to duplicate the problem. Even more puzzling, the online status report of my computer said "Parts on order," and yet no new parts were installed. The result was that within 20 minutes of my starting it up again, the backlight turned off.

I called CyberTest the next morning to politely but emphatically point out their error and see what could be done about it. The first guy I spoke with was pleasant and seemed knowledgeable, but he wanted to troubleshoot the problem and I didn't have the laptop in front of me at the time. So I called back a couple hours later. This time I talked to a different tech service guy who was rude, inattentive, and ended up hanging up on me. I was through playing games, so I called back and immediately requested to speak with a supervisor. The supervisor was much more polite, but that still didn't change the fact that I had lost the use of my laptop for more than a month. After a fairly lengthy discussion, he assured me that they would "put it through the wringer this time" to find and fix the problem. So I sent it off for the third time with the same problem.

They're done with my laptop, and it will be delivered tomorrow. The online status report doesn't give me any more information other than that the repair is complete. I'm more than a little apprehensive - I really need that computer back. After 6 weeks without it, my research and classwork are in a horrible state, and I have about 3 weeks to complete my research project. And yet I don't want to get my hopes up, since this company doesn't seem to be able to do anything more complicated than reinstall Windows and wipe out my data. I feel like the nervous family member pacing the waiting area in the hospital, waiting to hear how the surgery went. "Doc, is he gonna pull through?"