well, time to rant

Well.

Let's try this blog thing.

I require... angst! And pain! And... angsty pain!

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.......

..............

.... it doesn't seem to be working.

Anyway, my laptop - the first thing I've ever bought with money I earned myself, a Toshiba Portege 3480CT - is starting to show its age. I bought it with my first two paycheques ever four years ago, and it cost me an entire 258,000 yen.

I still love it to death, but the bottom PCMCIA slot seems to be malfunctioning. I found out about that when I tried to plug in a CF card inside an adapter and it asked me for a DRIVER.

"Whaaaat?!", I thought. At first, I suspected the CF card itself, but since it worked properly in my camera I decided to try to put my wireless card in the bottom slot too. Lo and behold, it also asked for a driver.

I usually only use the top slot for... reasons I'm not entirely sure of, so I'm not sure how long this has been going on.

I'm guessing the PCMCIA slots are a bit of a weak point in this model's design, though. When I first bought the laptop (from the Duty Free section of LAOX in Akihabara!), I brought it back to the hotel (Shinjuku Prince Hotel, that expensive expensive place to stay), and was eager to play with it.

One of the first things that happen the first time you turn on a brand new 3480CT is, apparently, choosing the operating system you want. You are licensed for EITHER Windows 95 OSR2... OR 98SE. And you can only choose one. So you do, and then it automatically wipes the other one from the hard drive and prepares the one you chose for first use.

I chose 98SE. That much should be obvious.

Anyway, so, it worked. That was great. I wanted to load a bit of stuff on it, however. So I took my El Cheapo "KingNet" 24X external PCMCIA CD-ROM drive that had happily serviced me and my Toshiba Libretto 100CT, and plugged it into... damn, I can't recall if it was the top slot or bottom slot now.

Nothing.

"naaaaaaaaa?"

Eject, plug back in.

Also nothing.

Okay, let's try switching slots, and... we have life!

That was... odd.

At that point, the CD-ROM drive was the only PCMCIA device I had on me, so I didn't have anything else to try it with. In any case, it was certainly not something that should happen, so I brought it to Toshiba's repair centre in Akihabara to see if they knew anything about it.

Now, let me tell you something about Japan. Although the Japanese use lots of bastardized English in their language by putting it all in katakana and using it in everyday words, they generally actually possess very little ability to converse and communicate in English.

This was the case with the employees of the Toshiba repair centre.

Now, at that point in my life, I barely knew any Japanese at all. It's... different now, but at that point, I was unable to communicate in any form using the Japanese language.

So after a LOT of gesturing, broken English sentances, and pointing, it was communicated to me that they recognize that the PCMCIA issue was a problem, and they will look into it, but it will take 2-3 weeks to get it back to me.

Okay, so that was a problem. First of all, I was leaving the country in a little over a week since I'm only here for a vacation, and second of all I bought this damned laptop less than 24 hours ago! Gimme a damned break!

So, the guys at the Toshiba depot called the LAOX store where I bought the laptop, and after another 15 minutes of conversation between them it was agreed that I could return to the store and get an over-the-counter exchange for a brand new identical unit.

Well, identical in every way except this one should WORK PROPERLY.

So, I returned, and found the "Mr. Arai" that the Toshiba guys talked to, and identified myself as the whiny Chinese bastard with the Canadian passport (you need a foreign passport to buy from the duty-free section... without paying duties, you know) with the PCMCIA problem, and asked him where my replacement laptop was.

So there he opened up a fresh 3480CT, and this time I stood there in the store and let it do the initial-system load thing, which itself took maybe 15 minutes, and then tried the CD-ROM drive in both slots, and... LIFE! Woohoo!

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... I don't know why I typed all that except to relate a story on why I think this PCMCIA slot problem might not be entirely uncommon. Or something.

I have some real work to do, so I'll wrap it up for now. I think.