Dell Laptop Issue

[epmi314]

Dell's customer service has been really good. Unfortunately I know some of the by name... Hard drive replacement #4 is on its way. If anyone needs tips on swapping hard drives on laptops let me know. See you all after I get up and running!

[ktuli]

What are you doing to kill drives that frequently? Have you told them to send you a drive from a different manufacturer?

- Bill

[epmi314]

I have no idea. I'm fairly handy with computers and was uber careful this last go around. They keep asking for the drives back to determine what went wrong and I assume hold their manufacturer accountable but I would only send it back cleansed and wasn't able to get that done befote total failure. I did ask for an HD from a different manufacturer this time.... I actually priced out a macbook today!

Thank God for my tablet! For $400 US I can screw one of those up every now and again and not feel too bad.

[ktuli]

Out of curiosity, what manufacturer were the drives so far?

[Colin Southern]

If it's a Dell Inspiron, one of my customers went through 5. Although I didn't verify this for myself, I did hear back that there was a contact on the motherboard causing the failures.

[epmi314]

Interestng... It is an Inspiron. I may have to use that nugget of info as leverage in the event I need to get tough with them. I've bought dells for my office for the last 5 years and frankly haven't had great experience. At this point I just count on computers lasting about 2 years before replacing.

Bill, I'll check the manufacturer and post.

[Colin Southern]

Interestng... It is an Inspiron. I may have to use that nugget of info as leverage in the event I need to get tough with them. I've bought dells for my office for the last 5 years and frankly haven't had great experience. At this point I just count on computers lasting about 2 years before replacing.

I hate to say it, but we've seen numerous issues with the Inspiron HDDs - Frankly I'm surprised that they haven't got on top of that issue by now. We've also seen their tech support playing politics -- I had a diagnostic report that showed that the HDD was clearly on it's last legs, but they wanted to run "their diagnostic" which showed that the HDD was "fine". It failed completely in the next few days ...

In all honesty, my advice is "do whatever you have to to get rid of it" -- and there's not many things I say that about.

[Black Pearl]

Had a 17" Inspiron for over five years now with two hard drives in it - not replacements, it has two hard drives - and they have never even hiccuped once. For the last year the bairn has had it, uses it every day, leaves it running, pulls the plug and generally does what you're not meant to do and it's still perfect.
Only thing I can add is I paid extra when I ordered it and got 7200spin FreeFall drives in place of the standard 5400's.

[Shadowman]

About seven years ago they had a problem with overheating systems, especially the Inspiron, which I still use on occasion. Apparently, they installed the fan backwards and it would suck dust into the system instead of out. There was a class action lawsuit which the consumers won, slightly, all they got was another year on their warranty. A friend of mine bought the same system, an Inspiron 5150, and his quit on him after about two years, mine still works but is starting to get a little sluggish lately. The cureall that I found in a forum was you need to blow out all the excess dust over time.

[epmi314]

Bill,

The last HD was Western Digital. The new one is a Toshiba. I just installed it and formatting now. Here's to a long night of reloading software!