Budol

*Doing the repair myself. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

(ALMOST) BUDOL 1:

After attending a boring press conference and interviewing a Japanese company president, I went straight to SM Mall of Asia to meet my sister in law who wanted to check out the Manila International Book Fair (MIBF) at SMX.

While waiting for her, I tried to have my old Lenovo laptop that I handed down to Twin I repaired at some random shop at SM Cyberzone. Its battery (even if I just had it replaced) was shot and some keys on the keyboard were not functioning. I was quoted at least PHP 7k for it. It’s about 3.5k for the battery that must fetched from their warehouse, 3k – 3.5k for the keyboard, and 1.5k for the reinstallation of Win 11 because the guy said it needs a fresh install since the OS is a upgrade from Win 10. He also said that he needs to check if the hard drive needs replacing because it’s booting up really slowly.

Right there — that part about replacing the hard drive made me think twice about this guy. First off, the HD is SSD and it’s not like the old HDD technology with spinning disk, which tends to slow down as it ages.

I said it’s too much, might as well buy my daughter a tablet that can be a laptop substitute (kinda like my Samsung Tab S8.

I checked out Samsung, Honor, and Lenovo tablets and they were all viable alternatives. But my girl decided against buying a tablet because “it’s too much money” and said she’ll ask her dad for a hand-me-down laptop.

Knowing that their dad is kinda slow when it comes to such things, I decided to do the repairs myself.

I took out the battery and did a fresh reinstallation of Win 11. The guy at the repair shop was BS. I was able to reinstall without reverting to Win 10. I’m currently waiting for the updates to finish and see if the laptop still lags. If not, I will install the latest Ubuntu on this thing.

I just checked Lazada and Shopee, the replacement battery is only 1k while the keyboard is less than 1k.

BUDOL 2:

I parked at Ikea parking area, so to cross to SMX, I must use the bridgeway at the second level. That meant that I would land at the second level of MIBF, where most of the stationery vendors were.

And that’s where the budol began and ended.