Conclusion of Issue.....

The new 1GB Dimm of RAM and 9-cell battery arrived. The 9-cell battery is much heavier than the 6-cell. Lisa actually noticed that the new laptop was lighter than the old one without me saying anything.

I swapped out the parts and sent everything back to Dell.

It's been over a week with the new laptop and I don't have any complaints. Things are working nicely.

What have I learned? I probably won't buy from the Dell Outlet again. There QC is lacking. If Dell continues to have such lousy customer support and farms out its warranty work to other companies who don't care about the Dell name, then they will continue to lose customers.

We'll keep buying Dells at work, but when I buy my next computer, I'll look at other manufacturers to give my business to.

New Notebook - July 20th

The new Dell Notebook arrived on Friday, July 20th. To my surprise it was a Dell Latitude D820. Since it is no longer on the website, I figured it wasn't available. It is a new, not a refurbished system. I looked at the description of the system, and it had a better display than the original notebook we purchased, but had a 6-cell battery and 2-512MB DIMMs of RAM, and the one we had originally purchased had a 9-cell battery, and 1-1GB DIMM of RAM.

I headed out of town for 5 days and didn't boot it up, I wanted to have some time to explore the new notebook computer.

Yesterday, Thursday, I booted it up and gave it a test drive. The display (WSXGA+) was nice, much higher resolution than the basic display on the original system (WXGA). I would never buy a low resolution display again.

Last night I emailed Ron, to see about just taking the RAM and battery out of the old system and swapping it with the components in the new system to make the new system identical or better than the original system we ordered. This morning Ron emailed me and said Dell was sending out a new battery and memory, next business day shipping. So by Monday this should all be resolved, and I'll send the old laptop back to Dell.

That will be just over 5 weeks after my first call to Dell about this issue.

Waiting game

It's been over a week since I originally emailed Ron at Dell and requested a new computer to be sent to us.

After a few days and no response from Ron, I emailed him and asked for an update. He replied that he hadn't received my request, and would look into why he didn't receive the email. Ron said we would be receiving the replacement system in 3-15 business days (that could be 3 weeks!). I asked for a way to track the progress of our replacement computer and he gave me a link and a reference number to use. After checking it a few times over 3 days and seeing no change, or any useful info, I emailed Ron back. Turns out that I can't track the new computer. I can only see what is happening by contacting Dell.

So, it's been 4 days, lets see when the new system gets here and what it is exactly.

Also, why does it take an entire day for Ron to reply? Is it some kind of tactic on Dell's part to drag the issue out, or does waiting a day make the customers less angry? I find it frustrating.

System Exchange

Ron, my Resolution Expert Center rep, got back to me today about my Dell D820 laptop. He gave me three options:

1. Send it back to be repaired again (I don't want to go through that experience again)
2. Dell will send me a replacement display and I can replace it myself (I would rather do this than option 1)
3. Return the notebook for a "System Exchange"

What does a System Exchange entail? Ron says:

"What a system exchange means is that you would get an identical system to the one you purchased or better. Therefore the processor, RAM, Wireless, and any additional cards that were already in the system would be the same or better. You currently have a LATD820 so you would get a LATD820 or the next one up from that which would be a LATD830. Since this is the same family of computer, the Memory, D/dock, and Bluetooth will fit in the replacement system.

If you felt that the exchanged system was not the same or better, then we would have to look at what parts you felt were not caparable and check each one out individually. "

That sounds like the best option. I did a little search on the dell outlet site, to see what systems they had that were similar or better, and I didn't see many D820s, so I bet the replacement will be a D830. I looked at the difference between the two systems, and didn't see anything major that stuck out at me. The D830 looks like it doesn't have the IR port anymore, but I don't use it anyway. The components on the D830 look like updated versions of the D820, though the video card options are different.

I told Ron that we wanted to to a system exchange.

D/Port has problems again.

This morning I booted up the laptop in the Dell D/Port, and after selecting the account to log in with, the screen went blank! It looks like replacing the motherboard didn't fix anything either.

This time, after a second or two, the screen came back on and for the first time I saw the message below.

"Display driver stopped responding and has recovered
Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Interesting, but did the display start working again because the motherboard was replaced, or because of the new display drivers I installed yesterday?

I'll have to see if it gets worse, and what Ron at Dell has to say.

A separate issues I had noticed yesterday, but thought it was just my eyes, some text "bleeds" over to the surrounding pixels. My wife used the computer all day and noticed it and brought it to my attention.

Laptop Back in My Hands

Today, July 5th 2007, I got my laptop back from Dell Warranty support. I opened the package and gave it a quick look to see if anything was missing. Low and behold, the plastic card blank for the ExpressCard slot is gone (these are the pieces of plastic that sit in your PC card slots on laptops when you don't have anything else in them, like a wifi card). Being that I don't have anything to put in that slot, I've never had reason to remove it. But look, it didn't make the trip back to Seattle from Tennessee. Nice work Dell.

Next, I booted it up. I immediately noticed that the BIOS was A05, not A06, like I had updated the previous mother board. No big deal, I can just download the latest version and update it. I checked and it still had the bluetooth and 2 GB of RAM (these were both parts I added after I bought the laptop, so I was worried that they wouldn't make it back to Seattle either, but they did).

After work I headed home and got online with my notebook. I actually downloaded and flashed Dell's BOIS A07 for the Latitude D820, which came out while Dell had my notebook, as well as the latest drivers for my video card, which were also updated last week too.

Next, I did a quick search with Google, and the display still has the issue with the beige color adds on Google. Maybe not quite as bad as before, but still, the pastel color is more apparent when you tilt the screen back 10 to 20-degrees than when you look perpendicularly to the screen. I looked at the history on Internet Explorer, and it looks like someone opened IE on Monday, July 2th or Tuesday July 3rd (I can't tell exactly since the clock/calendar was reset when the new system board was installed), but didn't do any searches so they wouldn't have seen my issue.

The background or wallpaper on my desktop is black. Just solid black. Not anymore. There are pixels on the left side of the display that are white. F***!!!! I start to look closer, and there are dead pixels all over the screen. I did a quick web search and find this. Dell replaces displays under warranty with refurbished screens! Also, Dell says these LCD displays can have up to 5 dead pixels and be OK to ship to their customers. Dell's Dead Pixel Policy I read on another website that refurbished displays can have up to 7 dead pixels.

I found a little application that helps you identify dead pixels on your display. I suggest you don't do this if you are happy with your display. Dead Pixel Buddy works by painting your screen black, white, red, yellow, green and blue. It helps you detect bad pixels. So I download and take a look at the display. There are at least 8 if not 10 defective pixels on my screen. There are even weird scratch looking spots.

One of the pixels is right smack in the middle of the screen. How annoying is that.

Dell, or whoever is running their warranty support, needs to get their act together. The "fixed" my laptop with a piece of junk display. At this point I would rather have the display that they replaced back. At least it didn't have an annoying black dot in the middle of the display.

About the D/Port issue, I've hooked it up to the d/port once now, and it didn't go blank/black. But it was an intermittent problem so I'll see what happens over the next few days/weeks.

Well, I'm off to contact my expert tech support guy Ron and get Dell to send me my Card Blank, and see about getting a new display to fix this POS.

junk to check out

This seems to be the outfit that Dell is outsourcing their warranty work too.

Solectron USA, Inc.
6269 East Shelby Drive
Memphis, Tennessee 38141
USATel: +1 (901) 260 2400

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/07/30.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=dell+solectron

This is the group that has given Dell an award for customer service:
http://www.thesspa.com/