Toyota Altis Major Car Servicing

Time to do a major car servicing to my Toyota Altis. Having clocked about 170,000km, some of the engine rubber seals and parts has worn out. Should have known that it was rather serious when I notices spots of engine oil on my house front car porch. It didn't cross my mind that the leak was serious. During one of the my field sales trip for a customer call on a late afternoon, I was suddenly taken in by fatigue and decided to have a pit stop in a Petronas petrol kiosk.



While having a cup of coffee, I was thinking, "Perhaps I ought to give the engine oil level a look since I'm already here in the petrol station." After my coffee break, I open the bonnet and was rather alarmed that the oil level was empty!

I was rather fortunate to check it and bought some engine oil. If the engine was to burn, it would be a major disaster! Anyway the Toyota Altis was due for servicing so may as well send it in to fix the engine leak and service the car at the same time.

Seems like the Toyota section 19 service centre is rather pack for those cars undergoing major servicing and I will have to wait for a full one week before I could get my car back! No choice I suppose.

Although the Fukushima earthquake has affected Toyota parts manufacturers, there is still sufficient Toyota spare parts for servicing and repair. So the delay is not caused by the spare parts shortage but rather so happen there was a large number of cars being sent in for major servicing and repairs.

According to the Toyota servicing staff, such major servicing usually takes about 3 days, but this time round, the car servicing will take longer due to lack of lifting ramp service bays.

Spying at my calendar, I noticed next week there will be a two week long school holiday break. Perhaps that might have something to do with the many cars being sent in. After all, parents would like to take some time off with their children and go for some travel destination holidays locally. Sounds like a plan! Well, my son is still rather young for any long road trip. Perhaps in another month or so then.

Meanwhile, I just have to sort out my transportation issue. In Malaysia it is a big handicap if you don't have a vehicle to move around, the public transportation is just way too unreliable!

[update: May 2012]

Again my engine oil was way empty! This time round I sent it to Kota Ming Motor for checking instead. They checked the engine but could not find any leakages. All the seals are as it should be. So they inform that whenever cars become old, the engine would start to burn off black oil into the exhaust system. The workshop owner joked that my car condition was so much better than his old jalopy!

I bought this car way back in June 2004, so it has been used for 8 years already. So a partial solution to avoid forgetting to check for engine black oil level, was to use semi-synthetic engine oil and have the car serviced every 5,000km instead of the usual 10,000km. A thicker viscosity oil would also help prevent the oil from being burnt away too easily by the engine combustion.

However by using a thicker viscosity, the drive would not be as smooth as a fully synthetic engine oi. I could live with that. After all the car has served me well for so many years and it was coming towards the end of its trouble free driving. You could see the many scars of driving in Malaysia. No way you could keep your car dent and scratch free. If you didn't knock something, someone else would eventually knock into your car, as the saying goes.

One thing for sure, a Toyota car has a long durable life span. Even though this Altis car was manufactured in Thailand and not Japan, it still kept much to its quality standard.

HP OfficeJet warranty exchange problem

I was very pleased when my defective HP OfficeJet all in one printer fax scanner was given a one-to-one exchange. But my joy was shortlived after receiving the replacement unit. I don't know whether this was a slip up from the HP warranty service department. I don't know why they gave me a defective unit as replacement, in fact this unit was much worst off then my earlier OfficeJet.

Although my ealier unit could not get a dial tone,it could still print and scan. The replacement unit was a total wipeout. It kept giving me a paper jam message when i haven't even fed any paper. My guess the previous owner was a having a seroius paper jam defective unit. The HP service department didn't do a good job with the repair and they release the unit?

Very poor show on their part. Coz it left me with a poor impression about Hewlett-Packard. In their attempt to discourage people from submitting their defective HP units for warranty claim (they want to charge me $30 for checking a unit stillwithin warranty!) and made me call for phone support and yet they gave me a defective replacement! I was thinking how they could give customers brand new unit, but actually they are just giving reconditioned units which were defective and send it by the previous owner.

Sigh! No choice but to call them again to give me another replacement OfficeJet for the defective replacement OfficeJet that was for my earlier defective OfficeJet.

If the next unit is also defective, it would really show Hewlett-Packard having a very poor on their after sales service.

In fact I'm thinking twice about purchasing HP products in future. In their attempt to cut cost to improve their short term bottomline they are sacrificing their long term goodwill of their customers.  

Got My HP OfficeJet J3508 All-in-one Fax Scanner Printer

Eulogy for Victor Seow Kok Leong

Victor and I shared some good times together, since the time I met his sister, Lena. Victor and I had many similar interests. He like planes and aircrafts and together with Lena went on a holiday trip to Langkawi and enjoyed the LIMA airshow. I didn't know it was a reward by my wife for his visiting the doctor. Later he took up aeronautical maintenance course. The college was located in a very ulu kampong area but somehow that college run by MIC wasn't very good and Victor had to quit the course.

A close family friend, Mr Chan introduced a job as a land surveyor but later Victor took up the challenge of network administrator. Victor have learned a lot from there and decided to venture out on his own to start up a security system company with the support of doctor friend.

Church Camp at Genting View Resort

Having an Alpha course for our church camp at Genting View Resort. With baby in tow and family members going to be a very interesting time here!

Breakfast at Awana Genting Highlands

Enjoying myself with the complimentary breakfast in Awana Genting Highlands. Breakfast crowd enjoying themselves. A bit of a queue at the egg omelet station, ever popular and one of my fav breakfast in a hotel.
The sky kinda gloomy but the Genting Highlands air is fresh. Not too cold. Probably about 26 ° C. My casio watch probably inaccurate since I'm wearing it, shows 29 °C.
Still a nice day and I could see many golfers going for the round in Awana Genting Highlands.the soothing greens is always nice to view and relax.
Time to go soon, after baby takes his bath!

Prince William and Kate Wedding

Wow it was really a grand affair from what I could catch on Astro. My wife wanted me to record the Prince William and Kate wedding event and it was 4-5 hours long! Fortunately my DVD can record 4 hours of it and not to mention the countdown and behind the scenes documentaries I had to use 2 disc instead. So that would about 8 hours worth of recorded DVD to watch later!

Faulty free gift - USB thumbdrive

If ever a free gift looks too good to be true, this is it. Spend 10 difficult to get points from All IT to redeem a faulty Microsoft free USB thumbdrive gift. Thought I would use it to store MP3 songs for my Red Fox wireless MP3 player. Unfortunately the data kept getting lost after transfer. Even back to exchange for another USB thumbdrive, but that too turn out to be faulty.

The All IT PIC wasn't very keen to entertain me the first time round and to change the second time round to another gift would probably be a bigger hassle. Talk about consumer rights and poor customer service hiding behind the policy of redeemable free gifts are not entitled for exchanges. Looks like I will just end up using this as a useless pretty looking keychain. I guess if I ever want to store important precious data, I should only use brands that I know, at least the defect would be under controlled and at the very least warranty against product defects. Next time I will be more weary about unknown generic IT brands. Always better to pay a little more for peace of mind!

[update]
While browsing around the internet, I found people actually bought fake branded flash drive. How the fake flash drive worked is by showing false capacity, ie if the counterfeiter would make the chip inside the pen drive show up as a 2GB capacity thumb drive, but in actual reality, the memory chip could only hold 512MB of data. I guess the same falls for this faulty thumb drive that I got from All IT.

Why do they do that? To save money from putting in the required memory chips and sell it at the market value of the higher capacity, but in the end the product is faulty and you can't use it at all.

However there are some tools out there where you can fix the reported capacity to the actual capacity and thereby you could still use it but up to the real capacity. Well, kinda too late now that I have thrown it away.

Anyway at the current rate of decreasing price of flash drive, I could get a 4GB thumb drive for as cheap as RM20! Anyway, I have many flash drive and I'm aiming at the high capacity ones with my latest procurement at 64GB! Wow! And yes, it is not cheap!