Everything I own is broken p. 2

OK, I'm going to give this MarsEdit thing another try and see if it works. I figure its only fair to give it a chance before the trial period is over.

Well, I mentioned in a previous post (at blogger, yea gods this could get confusing) that my laptop, my bike and my XBOX 360 all died in within a very short period of time. Well, thankfully the laptop turned out to still be under 'Gold Warranty' from Dell, so they actually sent a person over to fix after I gave them a call. The odd thing is that I found out about the warranty after I went out to get a new battery downtown. I couldn't find one, but when I got home there was a letter telling me that my super-do-everything-Gold coverage would expire in October. I didn't even know I had such a thing! I assumed that I had the usual 90 days or so of parts coverage on a refurbished laptop. Anyway, I gave Dell support a call and after testing a few things they determined the problem was not the battery, but the motherboard being fried. He put in an order for the parts, and a guy came to install them the next day. While I was checking things out on the Dell website I found out my battery is only one number away from the recalled batteries that were 'asploding. The battery was also replaced.

My bike's wheel was fixed earlier that week, but the mechanic said they couldn't fix the gear problem and suggested a different cartridge might solve the problem. This didn't make sense to me so I took my bike to the shop on South street. 10 minutes and 10 dollars later the bike was fixed. The problem was a loose gear cable. I think I won't be going to that other bike shop anytime soon.

The XBOX360 completely went red on me. Email to the support was kind of fruitless so I gave them a call and waited on hold for 20 minutes. Thank goodness for the speakerphone and the other video game system. The first thing they did mention is that the red light failure has had its warranty extended to three years. Yay! They also mentioned refunds to those who paid for them. It looks like those who went to third parties for repairs are screwed though. Once I got a live person she set up my machine for a repair. Which means they sent me a box to ship the thing to Texas in. It arrived a couple of days later. I packed it (minus the hard drive) and took it to the UPS store on JFK Boulevard, I should see a fixed version in 4-5 weeks. *sigh*

What was kind of scary was that despite the fact the box has no markings on it, the woman behind the counter recognized it as an XBOX repair mailing box. This does not bode well for the hardware.