amilo 1505 dead battery

hi peoples
had my amilo 1505 for 2 years now and its been an ok laptop.
its more of a backup for hospital work and remote linking for patient data as i didnt want to use my m860tu gaming laptop.
ive been paying £7.99 (i know im a mug) every month for the whatever customer support through currys digital..
problem is ive noticed over the last month that the battery will only last about 5-10 minutes and its getting worse. only just manages to boot up in windows befor the battery low warning light flashes and then the computer dies. works fine with mains power though.

rang up the customer support helpdesk last week and explained everything.
was told after 20 minutes that i should return the laptop for inspection.
i explained there was nothing wrong with the laptop and it was only the battery. doesnt matter was the reply,you have to return the whole laptop.
explained that i had patient data on the laptop so for data protection i couldnt send it in except the battery. i was told there was nothing they could do and i would have to buy another battery, arghh!.

so it looks like my only option is to totally wipe my harddrive.
ive just loaded windows 7 enterprise which is my hospitals version but the whole of vista backup is on a hidden partition which has a copy of all the patient data in it.
if i copy that file "windows.old" to an external hard drive and then delete it from the hidden partition using department of defence DoD 5220-22M shreader will that definately not be viewable and secondly once i get the laptop back if i replace that folder from my external hardrive will it still run and be viewable or because ive previously deleted it could i have problems opening it.
or is my only real option doing a reformat and clean install.

thanks in advance for reading.

 

no replys yet

 

oh well, 6 weeks and no reply. sad to see the fujitsu thread almost dead.

 

Yup, it's dead here, what to say?

Back to topic
Why don't you just send the laptop without HDD? The service center must have HDD to put in in case they want to do the test.

And you should kill them if they say they need the HDD to fix the battery.

Since you're going to wipe the partition with that so called DoD 5220-22M shredding will ensure no normal institutions or person will be able to recover data.

 

thanks for the reply raZ
guess what, yes the hard drive must be installed they said.

oh well,shread and reformat it will have to be.
thanks once again.