Tere!

When I became a first-year university student in Japan, I got a brand new laptop for the first time in my life. (I’d had only second-hand ones so far.) The brand new laptop was VAIO’s model, which I had used for around seven years until I came to Estonia and got a degree in postgraduate school. It means that it had been dying but it survived during my thesis period. In autumn in 2019 when I temporarily went back to Japan for the first time in over two years I finally bought a new laptop. This time I bought one from ASUS.

I was planning to buy one from either VAIO like the previous time or Macbook, but Macbook has only the charger port on the one side, and Macbook Pro was too expensive so I gave up the Apple products. I liked VAIO’s laptop design, but their spec was not enough for me. (Its storage was 256GB at maximum and I already used over 400GB with the previous laptop.) 

Then I asked one of my American friends, who said ASUS was great. I searched their laptops, found a cool one and bought it.

I got the product in Japan (because I used ASUS Japan) and brought it to Estonia carefully. However, when I started using it in Estonia, something seemed wrong.

The screen was frequently flashing.

I contacted ASUS’s support centre, based on whose advice I restarted Windows or reset BIOS, but nothing solved the problem.

I was so worried about any repair shop available for ASUS in Estonia as here is a really small country. I googled half-already-disappointedly anyway

and there was!!!!!!!

Then in the middle of November 2019, I went to the repair shop, spending almost one hour for one way to go there. The repair shop is in Ülemiste, which is near the airport.

The repair shop itself is quite small and doesn’t have any machine to issue the waiting number. They accept not only ASUS but other brands such as Nokia so if given that you need to go to this repair shop, just go inside and talk to the receptionist if there is no queue. Probably there are two ladies (one of whom looked quite showy and the other one wore glasses as my visit), so tell one of them that you want to get your device repaired.

The lady with glasses handled my issue at that time, and yet since she couldn’t speak English but Estonian and Russian, she went somewhere and came back with some engineer. I’m still not sure if it was concindent, but the engineer was the guy who I had been contacting by phone and email before coming to the repair shop. After meeting him, the procedure went smoothly.

Then in one week after I went to the repair shop, I received an email from the repair shop to get the laptop back, but Jesus Christ – it wasn’t repaired.

But why? This is because, according to the engineer, no matter how many times they tried to reproduce the error that I encountered under any possible circumstances, they couldn’t see it. The engineer asked me to send them some video so that they can know the issue better. I paid attention to the laptop while using it and successfully took one video and sent it to them.

Some of you may remember that I was supposed to go on a trip in March 2019 by using some days from the annual leave. I was going to have one week off, by using whose period I planned to go to the repair shop before travelling since I wouldn’t need it during the trip, but unfortunately COVID-19 panicked the whole world and affected my travel plan. I couldn’t go on a trip that I planned, but luckily (?) Estonia allowed groceries stores, pharmacies and the medical services and telecommunication services to run their operation even during the quarantine, so I revisited the repair shop.

On the 9th of April, I went to the repair shop again as planned after all the travel plans were cancelled and postponed. While my laptop was in the repair shop, I used my company’s old DELL laptop which was super slow to do my jobs and write some blog posts. 

I thought the laptop was really slow because it was so old, but the fundamental reason was its spec. It had Core i7 which seemed good but the number after the core type was something in 3000s. I was also using Adobe Photoshop with that laptop (and several other Adobe softwares as well), which occupied 60% of the laptop’s ability. This is why the laptop worked so slowly.

Eventually my CTO uninstalled around 10 Adobe softwares, which made the laptop not fast but a bit slower (better) and less irritating than the previous condition. 

Besides, one day I talked about this story to one of my colleagues on the phone, he told me to use one of the computers in the his room (the developers’ room) in the office because we all worked remotely for the quarantine so for a while they didn’t need them. However! I’m the type of person who cannot take such an offer obediently. Also I didn’t want to bother him because I didn’t know when I would get my laptop back from the repair shop and it might have lasted even until we all got back to the office after the quarantine.

Then coincidently (or fortunately?) I received an email about the repair completion from the repair shop!

The time to repair my laptop: approximately one month.

As a consequence, this article was written with my baby (my ASUS laptop).

(By the way, I didn’t pay even one cent for the repair since my laptop still had a warranty. As some you may know, the residents with the citizenship in Tallinn don’t have to pay for the public transport so I literally didn’t spend any money.)

That’s all about my recent trivial private news.

Aitäh! 🙂