My E6400- banged up, but still going strong!

I made a STUPID, CARELESS mistake a few weeks ago with my trusty Latitude E6400! There is some damage (which I’ll mention in a moment) but overall I am still very impressed with how well it held up!

On Mother’s Day weekend, I took my mom and grandma on an overnight trip. I removed my E6400 from my laptop bag at one point to look up the address for the Hampton Inn that my Garmin couldn’t seem to locate. Instead of putting it back in the bag, I slid it under the back seat with the intention of taking it into the hotel with our bags…but it slipped my mind until later in the evening. I returned to the car, grabbed it and headed back in carrying it loose (like a book) in my right hand.

I decided to stock up on Diet Coke on my way back to the room, so I sat my E6400 on top of a small vending machine about six feet off the floor. When I went to grab it one-handed with a few sodas filling the other hand, it slid off the back off the vending machine and landed front-edge first on the hard tile floor. A spot on the front of the base assembly (barely 0.5” to the right of the SD card slot) took the brunt of the impact when it hit a corner of the vending machine’s base. Immediately =, A thumbnail-sized piece of my E6400’s base assembly was bashed in and the right palm rest was bowing up slightly directly above the point of impact. I headed back to my hotel room imagining how bad it was going to be when I opened the lid and attempted to boot up….

I opened the lid and the display didn’t show any obvious damage, nor did the palm rest or touchpad. I pressed the power button, and it booted normally- the hard drive and LED display were unharmed! Removing the broken piece of the base allowed the palm rest to snap back into its normal position, so it wasn’t bowed up any more. Just the thumbnail-sized chunk of the base assembly was the only real damage. The only other (minor) issue is that the clear coat on the top part of the display bezel has started to flake off, which isn’t even noticeable under indoor lighting.

I’m impressed that my 2.5-year old E6400 survived as well as it did! =) Now I’m just trying to decide whether I should just glue the broken piece back into place, which will require quite a bit of disassembly. Or should I go a few extra steps and replace the base assembly altogether? The idea of moving the motherboard scares me, but I think I could manage…..any thoughts?

 

That is great to hear that the Dell Business Line is holding up to their reputation as rugged as they were advertised. I think you should go for repairs if you are adventurous enough. eBay sells tons of Dell parts and most of the time they are very affordable and abundant. Dell even has a detailed interactive service manual online that really helps with great visuals. So if you are up to it, I am sure you can get a new base enclosure for under $100 dollars on ebay and fix it yourself with the manual.

 

Would an incident like this cause the harddrive to fail faster?

 

if the system was off at the time, which it seems like it was, the hard drive should be fine. i'd run diagnostics to confirm though...

 

Well that's good to hear, as my E6410 had improvements over the E6400. I still baby my notebooks, but you know something called everyday life happens sometimes as my Vostro 1500 found out.

 

My E6410 took a tumble off an airport X-ray conveyor onto a marble floor and suffered a small chip to the paint on a back corner of the (closed) display. That's all the damage I found in spite of the big crashing noise.

John