M4400 being replaced by dell, what will they give me?

My M4400 developed a puzzling fault with the SD card reader and was showing intermittent problems like taking 3 hours to boot (yes, i even tried booting from external).

The technicians dell's prosupport sent changed the sd card reader, the mobo, 3 times, each time more problems appeared than there were in the first place.

I'm very fond of the M4400, but dell just offered to replace it with a brand new notebook, not refurbished mind you, brand new from the factory.

They're going to let me know on monday what the specs are going to be, but im still somewhat worried as to what they will offer because i dont want them to replace it with a studioxps for example, or "downgrade" me to latitude/vostro.

can anyone tell me what would be a reasonable expectation? the specs of my M4400 are in my sig.

personally i'm keeping my fingers crossed for the M4600

 

You'd likely get a bump to an older M4500 or if you are lucky M4600..

 

are the M4500's still in production?

 

Hrm well in the US it looks like they removed it from the normal page but I suspect they still have them in stock, you would just need to call up Dell.

IIRC you live in India?

 

nope i'm based in London but frequently travel to malaysia/singapore. dell UK is the one that captured the system for testing in their glasgow lab and couldnt fix the issue and is now offering a brand new system

 

after taking a look at the dell site and thinking about it, i concluded if they offer the M4500 i will not accept it, i'll ask them to fix up the M4400. The very marginal performance increase and slightly better cooling is not worth the inconvenience of losing those 120 pixels in the shift from 16:10 to 16:9

i checked out the specs of the new latitude E6520, it seems the performance is on par with the M4400 but its lighter and runs cooler, but meh..

the M4600 would be nice but the off centre touchpad would really annoy me. i never use a numpad anyway.

if they offer the E6520 or M4600 i'll probably sell it off. the lenovo W520 is looking good, or maybe i might look for a 17" model since i have my X201 to carry around. Not sure about the elitebooks.

 

Please keep us posted on how this turns out. I have a few M4400's with unresolved problems too.

 

whats the status on them? they only agreed to do a swap after capturing my system and testing it, and its been gone for a month now :| and while i love the weight of my X201 using a 1280x800 screen as my main machine for a month is really, really almost like torture and slowed down my productivity with assignments.

i know it wasnt just sitting somewhere collecting dust because the rep assigned to me kept me up to date very nicely with emails and weekly phone calls to update me on the status of the fix.

dell's prosupport is really worth every penny. its nice talking to someone who isnt robotically reading from a script but is actually a qualified tech.

 

Dell has had your laptop for month, probably more, wasted all sorts of your time, with no resolution to-date, yet you claim pro support is worth every penny?

It is collecting dust and some robot is sending you emails.

How do you define good support? Most customers don't want to talk to anybody. They just want the product repaired, quickly, on the first service call.

 

1) its not a robot sending emails, i dont know why you assume so-i've been sent videos of certain symptoms being reproduced etc, very very thorough diagnostic they're carrying out on it IMO

2) the month was partly my fault as i was abroad and told them to take their time...as they were unable to reproduce one or two of the intermittent issues. i'm a qualified technician myself, so i know when an issue is a tricky one, so i can see why this would take more time anyway. i only have 1 more year left on warranty and want to make sure the problem will not resurface later on. and they did replace every single possible part that could be causing the issue, 3 service calls in a week before they decided to capture the system to test it before being able to approve a system swap.

3)i've been using dells for 12 years now and this is the first time something hasnt been solved within 48 hours.

4) im now promised a new notebook, brand new-not refurb and on monday i'll find out what it is, so i guess we can call that a resolution?

5) my experiences with toshiba and HP (these were business grade units too, with priority support) are a far cry from what dell has.

so yea.
p.s please try and avoid hijacking this thread and turning into a flame war about how sucky dell is etc etc. i believe there is a separate subforum for you to vent if you wish.