Should I send in my M1530?

I have quite a few problems with my 3 month old M1530... lets begin.

First, my touchpad. I'm running the latest bios version (A09) and it's not the standby issue. When I first booted my M1530 fresh out of the box, the touchpad was completely unresponsive for about 2 minutes before it started working properly. The next day, it moved erratically clicking wildly and such and stopping after around 20 seconds. This happened occasionally. Friday, two days ago, I decided to talk to Dell about it because it wasn't working at all in Ubuntu (later discovering I had the improper drivers for it), but they said they would fix the touchpad in XP. They uninstalled the ALPS drivers that originally came with the laptop and installed some Synaptics drivers, this didn't go all that good that led to more damage to my laptop (keep reading). I decided to allow them to remote access in to do this, and after they were finished I tested out my touchpad before they disconnected. Well, it was very VERY slow, a full swipe of the finger at the highest sensitivity would bring me only 2 or so inches away from the start menu button. To add, it did not allow me to scroll at all. I decided to continue with it to try to get used to it, but tonight I turned on my laptop and started to browse the web. About 10 minutes into it, the touchpad wouldn't respond at all with clicking, getting frustrated, I applied quite a bit of pressure to the left mouse button. Finally fed up with the "improved drivers", I uninstalled them and went back to the Alps drivers. About 20 minutes after that, I was using my touchpad again and then it would not move up/down, only left/right. I kept moving my finger in circles but it refused to move properly, and would occasionally jump. It finally fixed itself about two minutes of not messing with it, and then I started browsing the web again. I went to click a link and the button wouldn't work... so I tried again... then again... then applied a bit of pressure and there it went. Seems like I bent the touchpad's surface under the button or something. Onto the next portion.

I've noticed alot of the time when listening to MP3s that my sound would pop, happening both on the internal sound and the external Sound Blaster Audigy notebook card. Read on...

I tried to check my main in World of Warcraft, and when I went to open it I could barely log on due to the chop. What pisses me off is I'm running in 800x600 fullscreen in the lowest details possible. Seeing that this is a pretty high-end laptop (T9300 @ 2.5ghz, 8600M/256MB, 4GB of RAM) I was extremely pissed off that it couldn't do what my 6 year old desktop can, and 3-4 year old Inspiron running on a P4 with an ATI 9800 could in 1680x1050.

To top it off, there's some physical damage that should not have occured as easily as it has. My laptop is nearly always in a case, if not, it's right next to me. It hasn't been dropped, knocked around, or anything like that... to begin, there is a 1in scratch at the top left of the HD LCD screen. When I first unpackaged it, there was a scratch on the LCD's hinge on the right side where the DELL logo is. On the casing of the LCD screen, the E of the DELL logo with the circle around it is missing quite a large chunk. It looks like DLLL. On the front of the casing about an inch to the left of the leftmost headphone output there is a small dent. On the first time I tried to plug in a USB plug into the top port on the left side of the laptop, I had to force it in due (and still now). On a flat surface, the laptop is wobbly a lot of the time. When pulling it out of a case near the top (where the hinge is), you can hear snapping like the case was loose and you're snapping it back into place.

(Also, this is my first post on notebookreview, I've been reading it quite a lot here lately. Happy to be a new member! )

 

Have you opened task manager and watched your CPU, memory usage. I have the exact same specs as you. I'm running WoW at 60FPS (v-sync) with no isues. Although, when I firt got the unit, it had a lot of bloatware on it. I just went in and disabled/unistalled anything I didn't want and turned most things off from the start menu.

 

When WoW was opened, I was using close to no CPU usage, and had more than plenty memory free. This Windows installation has only aged around one week, and was done with a boxed copy of Windows XP.

 

13 seconds to open WoW. I'm running WoW in the background right now, Firefox over it and I'm using 20% CPU usage, Wow.exe is using 10 of that, 129,880K memory. This is just at the login screen. Right now, Mozilla is lagging so bad that I can watch my letters come up after I finish typing. (takes about 17 seconds). World of Warcraft is getting about 4 FPS (800x600 with lowest settings) Under the Performance tab of Task Manager I have 2890484K of physical memory left. CPU usage is leveled at 20%.

 

Yeah, just send it in... -__-''
get it replaced and viola...

 

Thanks for your input, BenLeonheart... this is probably what I'll do and what I planned on at first but wanted a second opinion.
How hard do you think it will be to get a full replacement, or will they just replace the defective parts?

Also, do you know when their online chat opens up? I've been trying for a few hours and I keep getting:

Thanks in advance,
Tewan

 

well...
Online try like midday... um... like 10am usa time.. dunno..

i think they'll repace the whole thing if you provide enough reasons too... they're prettynice actually... BUT
they can just replace the parts if they "consider" thats the only thing that needs a replacement...

 

oh and i think they dont do online chat on sundays( its monday 12:35 am here in Honduras).

I had to contact them a few days ago, replaced drivers on my vid card, cuz... well..
its from the 1st batch of 8600m GT's so mine's defective, crap but w/e...
so i got them to transfer the order to dell latinamerica, and they'll send someone here... directly to my home.

edit: i dunno if its the 1st batch of vid cards or not, but mine suddenly started throttling for no reason...
so, instead of solving it, hell thats why i payed guarantee for... replace asap. and if its defective, bug the buggers back to come here leel.

oh and goodl uck with your DLLL xD

 

Ah, I see... hope that gets fixed.
Right now it's 1:38am on Monday here in Texas, so I'll try a bit later. Hopefully I can get them in the morning before school starts at 8:30am. =D

Also, what do you mean by throttling? Reducing the clocks for no reason?

 

Also, what is your GPU Core and Memory clock when running on battery (I have a 9-cell as well)?

Right now mine is 169MHz core, 100MHz memory. 61ºC temperature. When plugged in it is 475MHz core, 702MHz memory, 62ºC temperature.

 

Do you have your GPU driver installed? (Since you reinstalled a fresh copy of XP)

 

lol
they were overclocked slightly at 525/752
and yes, lowering clocks when the GPU overheats too much...

 

That's one of the first things I do when I reformat. Also, I wouldn't have been able to change the Powermizer settings in the Nvidia control panel if I didn't. =P

 

The scratch OR dent alone will make me call up dell and have them send me another system. You paid for a new system.. it should look and work like new.

 

Good news for me; I chat online today with Dell and they're sending me a replacement laptop. The chat session also went by at a nice pace, no "troubleshooting", no "try this", just jumped to the point:

I should be receiving my replacement in 7-10 business days.

Go DELL support! =D