Bits and pieces about free software and various other things.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Dell Support

Last week, on Friday, my dell xps m1330 broke (again...I had problems with the graphics chip some months ago). Luckily I purchased a support upgrade (2 more years of next business day support), so the technician came today to repair my notebook (well, not really next business day but it was my fault, I was busy on Monday and Tuesday).


Picture from http://www.codinghorror.com/

I've got a new power supply and motherboard, now everything works fine again! No data loss at all.

Thx dell, even if your products may not be the best (2 support issues in 1 year), your support is really great!

9 comments:

Francois said...

Felix, isn't it the infamous Nvidia failure with the G40 chips? It's a famous one, they have plenty of mobile cards dying because of a problem with one of the materials. My 1330 died because of this last year.

And Dell is offering a warranty enhancement of 12 months on the laptops affected by this problem (on the graphic card only of course!).

See there: http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2008/09/12/nvidia-gpu-update-limited-warranty-enhancement-details.aspx

Just in case your lappy is dying after the end of your warranty :)

Flex said...

Francois, you're right, the first problem was because of the graphics chip. But I've talked to the technician today and he said the new mainboard I got last time and this time has the new chip on it. He said the main problems are in fact with the graphics card, but he thinks it's not only because of the crappy nvidia chip, he thinks the notebook is to powerful for the heat sink they use.

the warranty enhancement will not be valid for me, because I have the new chip now! Anyways, I have support for the next 2 years and that should be enough :D

Francois said...

Is your laptop getting very hot? The harddrive setting is very important to keep the laptop cool. I changed mine in the bios, and the laptop was really getting too hot. My config is not really lightweight (T7500 I think, Nvidia, 7200tpm harddrive), so it was very hot and loud. After using the default setting for the HD and cleaning the fan, the effects were spectacular.

Anonymous said...

Mine died recently. The technician replaced the motherboard with the same defective GPU. Still gets hot and now I'm just waiting for it to die again.

Can't really trust it when you see the CPU temp get to 70 degrees and the GPU 80 or more!

Francois said...

70°C Jamie? On Ubuntu? Vista? Other Linux?
Under a lot of stress? Or just idle?

I think mine can go up to 70°C, but only when I push it. My CPU must run around 40°C when idle I think.

Flex said...

mine is getting hot to, but the cpu stays below 60 the most time! gpu is 10° higher and goes up to mid seventy sometimes!

a big problem is: flash and linux! thats why mine is getting so hot. watching youtube videos and other sites with flash animations requires a lot of cpu (and gpu).

well, as long as I have the support I don't care that much if it breaks down...if the technician is there the next day its not that bad. well it suxs but i think other notebooks die from time to time to. a friend of mine has had 2 broken hdd's with his macbook. he had to live withouth his notebook for a week or two each time...

Francois said...

True, flash is really a pain for the CPU/GPU. When you think about what it's displaying, it's nothing but a shame.

And I agree about the support, it's nice to know you will have your computer fixed the day after. Especially for a laptop where you can't change the parts easily.

Anonymous said...

So... get a mac. :-)

Roshan George said...

This happened to me too. The G84 graphics seem to be faulty, but I can't fault their support: The conversation was shorter than ten minutes and they scheduled to meet me in the city I was flying to.

I hope the newer board lasts. Good luck!

PS: The new BIOS keeps fan on too much, kills time on battery.

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