Thursday, August 27, 2009

Dell Laptop Dead. Sad Face. Happy Face.

I work with OSX, Linux and Windows. Most of my Python development happens on Linux, and I just use Windows to run VM instances of Linux. :-)

Unfortunately, my favorite machine, a Dell XPS M1330 died yesterday due to a common fault with the video chipset, which causes the graphics chip to get really hot and unsolder itself. This manifests itself by causing glitchy screens, then eventually the screen won't work at all, it just fills up with random vertical lines and slowly turns white.

Much of my Python game dev happens on this machines, so I was pretty sad. But... After some research, I discovered that Dell had extended the warranty of my particular model especially to cover the fault! Awesome. After ten minutes on the phone, a Dell technician is coming to my office tomorrow to replace the faulty parts. I'm very happy now. It would be nice if Apple respected their customers in the same way.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Something similar happened about 8 years ago with the iBook and Apple was pretty good about it. They didn't come to my office to fix it, but they did extend the warranty.

http://www.apple.com/au/support/ibook/faq/

Anonymous said...

Dell support is great, I work many hours a day on my laptop and it is calming feeling that someone would repair that promptly.

Anonymous said...

You write: "It would be nice if Apple respected their customers in the same way."

Apple already have done so. The following is from Apple TS2377, "MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues"

If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within three years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty.

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