Another warranty pays off...

This weekend, while looking at some photos on the laptop, heather noticed a vertical line down the display. Power cycling the computer didn't make the line go away. My first thought is that the display is going bad and that it's a line of dead pixels. I contacted the online dell help people and they helped me out tremendously. The online chat session is a novel idea. Sure there is a lot of typing involved, but there are no language issues and you have a record of your conversation in writing. The first guy i talked to had me run the diagnostic test and get back with them with the results. well, i couldn't get the diagnostic program to work properly on my machine -- probably cause i did some harddrive cleaning and re-installation of better software. The second guy had me connect the laptop to another monitor (why didn't i think of that??). Well, i did what he suggested and it turns out that the graphics card is fine. The vertical lines didn't show up on the desktop monitor. Well, that narrows down the problem. The technician set up an appointment for a technician to come to the house and replace the display. I'll report on how smooth this procedure goes. I hope all goes well. The interesting thing is that my warranty expires on this laptop in 7 days. Whew...talk about cutting it close! But another warranty pays off...it's gonna be hard for me to not buy warranties in the future.