Much like purchasing a lottery ticket, sometimes it seems "ya pays yer money an' ye takes yer chance" when it comes to buying a computer from a mail order business.
Personally I've dealt with Dell twice in the past and when I decided to purchase said lappy in December 2006 I had confidence lightning would indeed strike thrice and I would luck in.
Though dealing through India was at first intimidating, the gentlemen I spoke with had better command of the English language than half the people I work with and far superior to any of my teenage daughter's friends.
That said, I simply wished to note that after over a year of daily usage I have had ZERO problems with my lappy other than a need for a BIOS update I was personally too ignorant to recognize the need for.
I was therefore curious if there were others able to make similiar claim. I know Dell has taken a spanking lately in some forum topics but I wish to identify that there are occasions when things work out remarkably well.
All my systems in my sig have replaced GPU's in a less than a year.
Is this what I get for trying to get a performance GPU's?
Kind of ennoying because I hate the tech's to come to my place and rape my system - I'm not saying all techs do, but I only had one guy who was really careful w/ my system when he was replacing parts. Others just didn't give a damn, which even lead to replacing my M1330.
I caught him when some plastic part from mobo flew off my system, and when he closed the system up, the system refused to boot up lol.
my XPS gen 1 w/ ATI still runs okay at my mom's place.
One of the truths on the internet is that people complain more than they praise a product, generally speaking. I wanted to take a moment to praise a laptop I bought for my (then fiance) wife 4.5 years ago. A dell inspiron ~8600 (like this one [url]
IIRC, since I'm away from it right now, it has a 1.5 ghz celeron processor, 512mb of ram, integrated video card, 60 gig HDD...
For the entire time we have had it, not one hardware failure. The only "problem" we have had is that occasionally I need to insert a CD/DVD twice before it's recognized....not sure if that's user error, scratched discs, of the drive itself.
This thing regularly sees hours of operation on our down comforter running DVDs with no cooling pad. The underside gets hot to the point you can't leave your hand on it for more than 2-3 seconds. The hard drive has been infected with one virus ("Windows antivirus 2008"), receives highly irregular scans and defrag).
I have never cleaned the vents or taken off an underside panel. It has been lugged around, dropped from 1-foot-18" heights onto hard and carpeted surfaces multiple times. It has no dead pixels, the screen still looks fine (albeit it doesn't perform to today's expectations).
We routinely leave it plugged into A/C power non-stop and drain it till it auto-shuts down. After ~4.5 years, it will perform 2.5-4 hours of web surfing, e-mailing, word/powerpoint, and video activities before being drained.
I was reading some FAQs about proper notebook care and came across how many different rules I was "breaking"....and wanted to point out that this Dell, at least, has taken it all in stride.
I'm considering buying a XPS Studio 16 as a replacement, and have looked at some of the Sager models. My solid experience with Dell makes me want to stay with them, even though it appears the Sager models might have a few upsides in what I'm looking for.....
Apparently Dell is going to finish completely with the XPS gaming range (PCs & Laptop) in favor of the Alienware range. The XPS Studio range is expected to continue unchanged.
I have an XPS m1530 that has an LED LCD. Lately I've noticed that the brightness on the monitor just doesn't seem as sharp as it once was. A few days ago I had the opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison with another new XPS m1530 and there was a slight, although noticeable difference between the two in terms of the brightness.
I purchased the XPS 1330 January 2008, and it has been giving me problems forever. I got my motherboard replaced 4 times, 4 new heatsinks, a new CPU, a new Monitor. Additionally, the service I have received was very poor.
Is there a department I could call to try and return this? Also, now finally, they agreed to do a swap, and to top it off, they are sending me the wrong keyboard layout. I purchased the laptop in Canada (US Keyboard layout) and I am currently in the UK. I have 3 years international warranty. When I filed the swap with the first technician, I asked specifically for a US keyboard; however, upon calling today, I was told, I would be given a UK Keyboard instead.
So, anyone know what I can do? Or better yet, anyone want to take this laptop off my hands (you will obviously get the swap).
I've had my laptop for under a year and my battery is much worse than when I first got it. I seem to recall reading about some feature of the xps laptops that I may return the battery within 1 year, no questions asked. When I called up they said I would need to call back when I'm in front of the computer. Is anyone aware of the battery return policy for xps laptops?
They told me if there's a defect I could exchange it within a year (afterwards no luck.) I'm a bit worried that they'll say this is just normal use, even though the dell website says battery decline is normal after a year.
I have been using an XPS m1530 as my primary laptop and has been always plugged in (less than 10 times completely drained).
Now, after 1 year i just reached 1h30mins with surfing & music streaming at 3 steps below the higher brightness (and at the energy save battery scheme)
I have a 2 year old xps m1530 WITH the 4 year complete care package. After having a service tech come to my house NUMEROUS times to repair and replace the motherboard fo various problems, Dell has agreed to replace my XPS. Because the XPS m1530 is discontinued they said it would be a comparable model??? Has anyone had a replacement recently, and if so which model did you receive. I am mostly concerned about which video card I will get. I do alot of gaming on my laptop and currently have an Nvidia 8600. Now that Dell is using ATI, which card SHOULD I expect to get?
My M4400 6-Cell battery goes for about 45min on full charge. Ive had my laptop for a year now. Is this normal that it dies so quickly?...
I started noticing this a week or two ago and now on startup I even get a notification saying "your battery life is decreasing, now is a good time to buy a replacement battery"...
I dont remember how long my Inspiron 8200 laptops battery lasted but it feels like this one gave in really quickly. I do use my laptop a lot. Its on most of the day....
I started looking at the XPS M1530 way back in early 2008 as a potential laptop to purchase as my first laptop, and I found that it was all around the best deal for a 15" laptop when I bought it in July of 2008.
I originally wanted the 6 cell due to the slimmer design but ended up purchasing the M1530 when the 6 cell was not in stock and the 9 cell was a free upgrade.
So I got it with the 9 cell. When I first tested it a few weeks after purchase I was able to get a little over 4 hours (almost 4.5) with Wi-Fi on and the screen at low-mid brightness. Today I tested again, I unplugged it from the wall at 4:50 today, and at exactly 7:40 the screen shutoff. That is 2 hours, 50 minutes. That is over an hour worse then what it got originally.
I know all hp desktops and laptops come with a 1 year warrenty. Does the warrenty cover accidental damage? I didnt damage mine But I dont know if the 1 year covers accidental damage or only the 2 year does.
I have bought M1530 on 28th of April 2008, together with 1 year warranty. It expired on 28th of April 2009, however from what I am reading I qualify for 1 year extra GPU warranty, am I right?
But when I phoned Dell (it was when my AC adapter broke and needed replacement) on each occasion I asked about this extended warranty and they were always telling me that they never heard of it.
Am I being lied to? Or are they right? When I check the servicetag status of my laptop it says that warranty has expired and there is no extra warranty there (if there was it would apply till 29th of April 2010).
I left my Z sitting too long not connected to power (in sleep mode) and the battery ran down. Now it will not boot up. It won't start off battery, off of power, off of power without battery -- it just blinks green, I can hear the DVD drive momentarily engage, there is a slight "beep" -- it tries this about three times before giving up and shutting down.
I dont follow MBP refreshes, but since I am considering it for my next notebook purchase, I wanted to know when is next MBP refresh arriving and if apple does just one refresh of its notebooks each year or more than one? Anything out yet what will the refresh bring?
A great friend of mine got me an intel SSD drive for my bday. I installed it into my dv7t (replaced one of the two 500GB drives I had in there) and installed Win7 onto it.
I don't know if it's just me, but this drive FLIES! true, the bootup time did not change drastically (~50 seconds from the second i press the power button). however, from the second i click shutdown, my laptop is fully powered off in 7 seconds!
for kicks, i copied my 33gb itunes folder to the SSD drive. i launched itunes and had it "import" my 7,000+ songs - this took less than 3 minutes! as the top of itunes says "song 1 of 7,000".... "song 2 of 7,000" etc, this literally flies so fast you can't read any of the song titles. i had my 33 gigs of music imported in less than 3 minutes! i could not believe that.
even copying files to a usb drive is much quicker. I am able to copy a 4GB ISO file onto an external hard disk (not powered) in about 2 minutes. the copy is amazing - right when the copy starts, the SSD drive says it's transferring at over 600MB/sec! it then comes down to the 80-120mb/sec range.... why oh why can't it stay steadily at 600mb/sec!
anyway, just sharing my experience. IE loads as soon as you click it, msword loads in a second or 1.5 seconds roughly. the drive was about $250 w/taxes+shipping and i did notice a boost in many areas like i've mentioned.
i play unreal tournement 3 and the game play seems much more fluid now. going between menus is much quicker as well......
I went to check out the sony esupport website for my model number to see if sony put official drivers for Windows 7.
What I get on the support page is
"The hardware configuration of this model does not meet the minimum system requirements needed to run and provide the full experience of the Windows® 7 operating system.
Windows® 7 installation is not recommended and Sony will not be providing Windows® 7 drivers for this model.
* Have another question?
Windows® 7 provides great new features to enhance your computing experience.
Visit our online store SonyStyle® where you can choose from a wide variety of VAIO computers that come with Windows® 7 preinstalled. "
What is this? A laptop I bought a year ago with duo cpu p8600 @2.40GHz and 4 GB ram. Will not run windows 7 adequately? Thats funny because I have been running Windows 7 since the early betas and currently run the 64bit RC.
I've been watching the order on Dell's site all week, as it was scheduled to ship (on or before today) (2/21/08), and I opted for Next Day shipping.
When I placed the order, the woman I spoke with asked for my Service Tag number. I, um... don't HAVE one... I didn't say this, I simply said I don't have that information at the moment. She asked how I got the part numbers, and I told her from their own Spare Parts page.
Well....the order got cancelled today. Saw it online while at work, just before I left for the day. Another order number with the identical items was created, with a scheduled ship date of 3/3/08. WHAT?
The woman just called....she states they cannot process my order without a service tag number. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!
I told her I don't have a tag number....she asked if I was building one. "Yes." To which I hear...
"Oh....well, I don't think our supplier will allow that without a service tag number, because we reserve those parts for people who bought m1710's."
I said "That's amazing...because I know a number of people who have done the same thing I'm trying to do, and had no problems getting these parts."
"Well, that's because they have m1710's"
*mad enought to scream at this point* "Um, no...where do you think I got the idea from?? I'm certainly not the first person to have this idea."
how I can get them to sell me some refurbished plastics? What's the secret password?
What would cause the computer to come up with the blue screen of death and say system haulted and the number lock led to be lite up? all iw as doing was listening to music. temps were cpu 61c and gpu 54c.
I just acquired my 1st XPS notebook this week (bought it used) and so far, I'm loving it. Not a huge fan of Dell desktops but I must admit, they have done something amazing with their XPS/gaming systems. And their warranty services aren't too shabby.
My current system is as follows: Intel C2D T7200 @ 2.0GHz 4MB L2/667MHz Go 7900GS 4GB DDR2 RAM 200GB 7200RPM HDD Gigabyte wireless adapter (not sure which model but it supports 108Mbps)
Got it for a good price so I wanted to know the following...
Is it worth it for me to upgrade the CPU to possibly the T7600/T7600G? Is it worth it for me to upgrade the GPU to the Go 7950GTX?
I was looking into OC-ing my CPU and GPU but I haven't found any information on OC-ing the CPU. As for the GPU, the sticky here seems to be pretty easy to follow. I will try that tonight and see what I can push out of my system. I've never been huge into the OC-ing scene
I rebooted and noticed that there are now loads of lines all over my screen and when it loads to the next screen I see some green boxes.
I have let my Laptop cool down for 24 hours and its still doing it. I emailed a guy online who said he can fix for £100 so I am guessing he will fix the actual GC rather than replace.?
What is the best OS for M1710 right now i have Vista 32 and i will be doing reinstall and i dont know should i instal vista 32 again or maybe vista 64 will be better or maybe xp mce sp2
some ram to get for my M1710 or M9750 to move up to 4 gigs. I'm thinking of getting Geil, but reading the reviews I'm thinking otherwise.
[url]
i understand on XP I'll only get 3.25 but I figuire I'll just buy the bundle and max out rather then trying to find and buy another 2 gig stick a year from now.