Repairing My Laptop: A Visit To Shanghai

It is of great difficulty sometimes to anticipate what would happen, even in quite a near future as one or two days. I am just suffering from this unexpected experience with my laptop. This story was started in a cliff morning of a Thursday when I suddenly found my laptop did not work. After an in-depth explore of the whole morning, I gave up all the attempts. Because what I have done is of no significance to the resolution but only the damage of some components, like the switch for the battery, and a plug-in on board. Fortunately, they are of little importance to my usage of computer.

A call was made this morning to the headquarter of Dell in Xiamen for negotiation on my repairing. But the answer seems to be disappointing. The custom center for Dell is only available in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. For the customers like me in Suzhou, the only solution is to contact with Dell via an email identifying the problems, and the paid service would be arranged based on my agreement to the price they suggest, which would be offered as a reply to my mail in a working day. Considering the day today is Friday, and a reply would be available no earlier than Monday, I decided to travel to Shanghai with my laptop.

After a call to the center in Shanghai, the staff there told me free service would be available if there is no serious problem. Considering my familiarity of the streets and locations in Shanghai and an electronic card for subways and public traffics, there should be no great problem for my travel. What’s more, I can talk with locals with fluent dialect of Shanghai.

The travel gets quite smoothly except for the ticket. There are too many scalpers that control nearly all the tickets and a 5-yuan premium is added for each ticket to Shanghai. Thanks to the express train that 46 minutes is sent for this trip to Shanghai ( The speed is reduced due to some accidents some months ago), which is nearly identical for my travel from the railway station to the custom center. The sight along the road from the subway station to the center is quite beautiful and classic. You can see many old buildings on both sides, which used to be the gardens of the riches before the liberation. Now, they are mostly served as the restaurants and cafes. Both English and Chinese are written on the board, which presents the feature of an international metropolis.

The repairing of this laptop seems to be quite a simple process. The engineer just helped me re-install the memory sticks and take some adjustments on the plug-in. Some tiny problems are detected on my motherboard but they were of little influence. Obviously, i would not spend 1000 yuan for a motherboard on a laptop that is nearly 4 years old.  It is really convenient for the customers of Dell in Shanghai, since I saw most services they offer are quite fundamental, reinstalling the system, adjusts on the components etc. What’s more, most service they offer are FREE, no matter whether your laptop are under warranty. Of course, high price may be encountered if your computer is suffering from severe problems, and what’s more, you are out of warranty.

More or less, the computer is fixed, though I don’t know when it would die. Wish it can work fine for next few years, before I would afford to a new module.

PS: The time without computer is also quite luxury, watching TV or reading a book is also a good style of life, but unfortunately, it has be overlooked by me for years. Thanks for this accident, it gave me the chance to remind me of the life when I was a student without a laptop.