Please remember that the site is hosted in south africa where bandwdth is expensive. we have the worlds most expensive adsl. Look at www.hellkom.co.za for more bad internet stories.

No. I have had two IBM Thinkpads and a Toshiba and one of the Thinkpads had to go back to IBM once because the case was cracked and the Toshiba had to go back to Toshiba because the battery wouldn't charge (the problem wasn't the battery). In both cases I only had to pay shipping which I believe was like $30.00 and in both cases I got the notebooks back in less than a month.

So I personally don't agree with what you said. My experience has been that both IBM and Toshiba were very good about honoring their warrantys in a timely manner. And both of them fixed the problems. Without the warrantys I never would have been able to fix the cracked Thinkpad, maybe put some epoxy on it but that would be ugly as hell. I also could not have fixed the Toshiba.