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.