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Re: [ProgSoc] lapsoc query
Thank you to all who responded. It's always enlightening to see
what other people consider important about bits of tech (it's
rarely what you expect).
Having said that, there are some things that we all seem to agree on.
Most laptops (at least up until v.recently) make the mistake of only
having 2x USBs, maybe 1x 1394, and retaining the archaic parallel
plug for reasons known only to themselves. (I haven't used one of
those things since 1997).
I'm doing a rollout of some HP gear at the moment, so I'm about
to become very familiar with some of their kit. I have un-fond
memories of their earlier stuff (maybe under the Compaq moniker)
that's doubtless prejudicing me a bit there.
Oh, Nathan ...
The fact that I haven't done any on-list price comparisons between
similarly dimensioned Mactel & non-Mac-but-still-tel laptops, does
not in fact prove that they're not pricey, merely that I'm lethargic,
happy to take empirical evidence where I find it, and I've had little
luck in finding *sufficiently comparable* (for other people) boxes to
demonstrate the price differential.
Or something like that.
Anyhoo .. my own complaints (in addition to the above) with my
Dell Inspiron are - proprietary & expensive power supply (yeah,
common), the requirement to open the lid to turn it on (90% of the
time I have the lid down with external keyboard/mouse/display),
and the fact that Dell charge like wounded bulls to even think about
the idea of considering looking at my box to quote me for repairs ..
To wit -- and here the more cautious reader may wish to just hit
their delete key, as this is almost definitely whinge material -- when
my machine died recently in a weird, video-oriented kind of way,
I tried finding help on the Dell web site. More power to them that
they offer service manuals on-site for free. Less power to them that
they offer a hidden (basement, unused toilet style) service to quote
you on out-of-warranty repairs. The links that you take to get to
this page involve cautious navigation through a myriad of 'why
don't you buy an extended warranty?' links in various guises. If you
do successfully get to the page where you tell them your service tag
and they tell you what you already know (you're out of warranty by
4 months) ... you get dumped into a page with three options -- all
of which involve you buying a year's worth of extended warranty.
Uber-frustrating. Eventually resorted to emailing a marketing type,
who seemed quite helpful and redirected me to the spare parts mob
in .au, keeping herself on the CC. She talked of a CAR (Collect &
Repair) offering - they take your machine, keep it for up to 7 days,
give it back to you with a problem analysis & quote. The spare parts
guy then asked for my service tag again (oh-oh) , and then sent me
a quotation for ... a year's worth of warranty.
Much joy.
Curiously this extended warranty - for one year - is around $A650.
When I bought the unit about 3.4 years ago the three-year warranty
cost me around $A700. Noice.
Anyway, the obvious question got shot back -- WTF happened to the
CAR / quotation thing, which must surely be a cheaper option.
Evidently not -- and here we get to the point -- as Dell offered to
charge me $450 to do the analysis and prepare the quotation
for the parts and labour involved in doing the actual fixing.
In response I got one of my team to have a look at the thing (I've
been practising saying 'I'm not technical' for a while now, and don't
want to destroy the image) and he seems to have, with just a screw-
driver and a can of compressed air, got the thing working .. with
occasional crashes. Considered opinion is that some goo might
even resolve that problem (the nvidia chip's heatsink uses that
thermal tape stuff). I'm guessing that maybe over time the tape
may change shape after lots of expands & contractions (?).
In any case, if it gets worse despite my efforts, then I'll probably
look at replacing the video daughter board myself (depending on
spare parts cost from Dell - probably not cheap) and then hunt
around for a replacement laptop .. again. MSY seem to have some
good Acer/Asus style devices at reasonable costs, and I'm starting to
adopt a much more relaxed attitude towards quality these days, with
regular replacement being so much cheaper than up-front quality.
Jedd.
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