a cheaper price isn't necessarily a better deal

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Dec 6, 2006

Others I know in the I.T. industry tell me at least once a month how much better a deal I could get if I bought Dell (or Acer, Toshiba, Sony, etc.) notebooks for our company rather than IBM ThinkPads. But I wonder if today I would've felt that a cheaper price was really a better deal?

Last night I got home at 7:00 p.m. I turned on my ThinkPad T41 at 7:15 and heard a beep, then saw the words "Fan Error" flash on my screen and then the computer shut down. I Google'd the error and determined that ThinkPads have a built-in protection mechanism to prevent the machines from running when a fan fails so that they don't overheat and damage the processor.

My ThinkPad is two years old, but still under warranty. At 7:28 I submitted a warranty repair request through the IBM website. At 7:49 I received a call on my cell phone from a pleasant (but hard to understand) Indian gentleman confirming my request and to tell me that a service tech would call me within 24 hours. At 8:35 this morning, I received a call from Ken, an IBM support technician, asking me if he could stop by today between 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. to install the fan that would be arriving in his warehouse today before 10:00 a.m.

Ken showed up at 12:40 and was gone by 12:55. In less than 24 hours I went from a non-bootable system to a fully repaired notebook without ever having to dial a phone.

Friends, that's why I continue to pay a premium for my ThinkPad notebooks.