Toshiba Mobile Care have come through with the delivery of the laptop within 24 hours as promised. I got a report explaining what had been repaired. According to the report the following was repaired:
- Replaced CPU Fan
- Cleaned Dust from CPU Heatsink (why not just replace the fan and heatsink most desktops and laptops have them standard as one part)
- Updated BIOS
- Battery being replaced and is on backorder.
I have been running it all day next to me at work and currently its cpu temperature is at 38% and the fan is running at 81%… All it is doing is running Media Player and sitting there… I guess it is no wonder why the Toshiba A500 Overheated. I will be putting the Antec Notebook Cooler 200 on the laptop when it gets home so it will be interesting to see the CPU temperature after a while of it running.
Just got word from Toshiba that they have received the replacement parts for the laptop. When asking them what the parts were that were replaced they said “A fan and a battery.” As I am a person who is inquisitive by nature I asked “What fan was getting replaced.” The reply I got was “It does not say what fan but there was a faulty one which has been replaced along with the battery. The laptop will be sent out this afternoon and you should receive it tomorrow.”
My initial response is “Great.” Service was a little slow from the get go but it looks like just over 1 week later I have got my laptop coming back in what is apparently a “Working” state. I will however have to wait a further week for a replacement battery to be sent out as the courier used by Toshiba does not transport batteries as a part of their company policy.
In conclusion it looks like this whole Toshiba A500 overheating issue was relating to a fan (not surprising) but there is no way of telling if long term damage has been done to any other components in the machine. I guess it will be a waiting game on that one.
Was the wait worth it? Probably was from a basic cost standpoint but for the amount of down time suffered without the laptop I would say probably not as the fan is most likely to be worth a whole 10 or 20 bucks.
For the past few months now Joomla 1.6 has been in alpha stages. Infact it has been in Alpha 2 with no news or even worse yet no accurate indication to when Joomla 1.6 will go to beta. As an avid fan of Joomla and what it has to offer it seems as though public releases of Joomla 1.5.x and Joomla 1.6 beta is no where to be seen.
It is something that the Joomla community is very paitent about and while I would say that I am one of those individuals I would also say that the next beta will be something that not only the Joomla development team should be but one that everyone will be impressed with. I would go as far as to say that the next release may have a great chance of even knocking WordPress off of its pole.
Once Joomla 1.6 Beta is released I will be doing a review on it for everyone to read and see. Stay posted and until Joomla release the much awaited beta… bye for now.
Some of you who have played with virtuemart have probably not had much luck browsing around the somewhat cumbersome filing system used to develop virtuemart. Do not get me wrong it is a 10 fold improvement on what was in past editions. I have been working continuously on this project for a client and discovered that with a bit of effort and fine tuning you can actually do all your Virtuemart customizations within your style.css file then make the remaining modifications to their files. Using the style.css file for formatting Virtuemart will also save you time and effort trying to track down the right file. This same theory can be applied to other joomla components. Joomla will always check in the themes css file over the components css file.
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Finally after some 2 days the laptop is on route to the repair center. Toshiba – external courier communication system absolutely sucks and does have a 48 hour lag between submission of warranty claim to pickup and delivery to the nearest repair center.
I have been told now that it is on route it should be at the repair centre within the next 18 hours. Which is sort of scary considering I could have driven to the repair centre and it only taken 1.5 hours to do…
lets see what toshiba has to say once they get the laptop.
Today my laptop died a dismal death. I purchased the laptop late 2009 and some 6 months or so later the laptop started switching itself off while surfing the net. While this was a tad strange I went to pick the laptop up which to my surprise was extremely hot.
I did a google search on another machine as to what would cause the issue and basically it was a bit of a loss cause except to see on various forums the same statement “It is a warranty issue. The product is known to do this. Get the service team to look at it.”
So off I go to the department store where I purchased the laptop from. After waiting 10 minutes for service they advised me to contact Toshiba directly. The gave me their number (13 30 70 #2 #2) and so I called them. The support team member was helpful and provided pretty good instructions.
I packaged up my laptop as requested and waited for the DHL courier to pick the parcel up. After 3 hours of hearing nothing or seeing no one I figured that they had forgotten to tell me to contact them once the laptop is ready to be picked up.
Surprise Surprise after another phone call I got a brilliant response “The DHL courier will contact you in the next 24-48 hours.” Loving this support so far. Typical warranty service so far… good thing though I do not have to pay for freight.
I will keep posting on this as things progress.
A little while ago an article was published on this website titled “Joomla Template – Front Page Component Modification“. In this article we covered how to enable the frontpage component to work in an “Out of the box” styled scenario when building your own custom template. Since then a website has being getting built that is using the frontpage component. During the development of this site I have developed the frontpage component further.
While working on a new website for an existing customer I stumbled upon a problem which could have potentially taken me over 6 hours to complete. As it was the upgrade of their website was already quite extensive and had taken a fair amount of time. One of the major upgrades that was going to take place on the somewhat dated website was the Virtuemart component. So how big was this and what did I need to do to ensure that the Virtuemart Migration from 1.0 to 1.1 was successful? This site had approximately 1000 orders, 700 customers and about 750 users. There was a large amount of products (approx 500) which contained a mix of downloadable products and physical products. I was in a predicament where I did not want to spend much time on the moving of products.
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