My laptop! It's alive! Finally!
It's hard to explain the 1.5 month long saga that got me to this point. Ultimately IBM did right by me and I'm satisfied, although a) it still cost me some money and b) I'm not entirely sure it's IBM I'm beholden to. They keep selling off so much of their business... So while I'm sitting here willing to buy from IBM again, I can't. It's Lenovo now. But then again, maybe it was Lenovo that took care of this. Or maybe it was someone else. Who knows?
But in any case, the computer works and my hard drive was not wiped. Which is convenient. I think. There's a part of me that kind of would have liked a clean slate. But, nah, this is better... (right?)
And not a moment too soon. Yet maybe it was good that it took this long and I had month and a half away from my machine. It gave us time to see other people...