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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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