So I was at Ocracoke island, camping with family, and I brought my laptop along as I've done probably half a dozen times before. An enormous thuderstorm came up. It rained for 8 hours and thundered for 3 of those. Some lightning cracks quite close by as we crouched in the food tent, our feet up off the increasingly wet ground "just in case". The campground flooded. Luckily we were camped in the dunes and tents mostly avoided being flooded with 2-3 inches of water. (That was just the warmup; a hurricane hit a week after we left.)
My laptop was in my tent when this started, and I got soaked to the skin just running over there and throwing it up on the thermarest to keep it out of any flooding and away from any drips. It seemed ok, so best not to try to move it to the car in that downpour.
Next time I checked, it turned out the top vent of the tent was slightly open and dripping. The laptop bag was damp. But inside it seemed ok. Rain had slackened to just heavy, so I ran it down to the car. Laptop appeared barely damp, but it was hard to tell as I had quite forgotten what "dry" was. Turned it on for 10 seconds to check the time. It was 7:30 and we still had to cook dinner in this mess. Transferred it to a dry bag.
(By the way, in some situations, discovering you have a single dry towel you didn't know you had is the best gift in the world!)
Next morning, the laptop was dead. When powered on, the fan came on full, the screen stayed black, and after a few seconds it turned itself back off.
I need this for work, so it was a crash priority to get it fixed or a replacement. Before I even got home, I had logged onto Lenovo's website to check warantee status and found 2 things:
- They needed some number from a sticker on the bottom of my laptop. Which was no longer there.
- The process required some stange login on an entirely different IBM website.
At this point, I had a premonition of how the beuracracy would go. Reading Sesse's Blehnovo, I see I was right. I didn't even try. I ordered a replacement with priority shipping.
When I got home, I pulled the laptop apart to try to debug it. I still don't know what's wrong with it. The SSD may be damaged; it seems to cause anything I put it into to fail to work.
New laptop arrived in 2 days. Since this model is now a year old, it was a few hundred dollars cheaper this time around. And now I have an extra power supply, and a replacment keyboard, and a replacement fan etc. And I've escaped the dead USB port and broken rocker switch of the old laptop too.
The only weird thing is that, while my old laptop had no problem with my Toshiba passport USB drive, this new one refuses to recognize it unless I plug it into a USB 1.0 hub. Oh well..
Update: Ocracode for this trip:
OBX1.1 P6 L7 SA3d+++b+c++ U2(rearended,laptop death) T4f2b1 R2T Bb+m++++n++
F+++u++ SC+s-g6 H+f0i3 V+++s++m0 E++r+