While I was out of town over Christmas, the keyboard on my Sony Vaio Pro laptop stopped working. I was annoyed.

When I got back to New York, I called for warranty support. I was told to drop the laptop off at the Sony store, where two different technicians shook their heads in befuddlement at the fact that I’d removed Windows from the machine. They warned me that the service tech would probably have to do a factory reset, because it’s necessary to boot to Windows to complete the service checklist. I was very annoyed.

I got the laptop back today. To my delight, my data had not been touched. The Sony tech managed to work around the unsupported OS, booting from an unsupported bootloader that requires non-standard BIOS settings, with Dvorak as the default keyboard layout. To that tech, wherever he or she is: thanks, and well done. (I’ll overlook the crappy Intel stickers you reapplied.)