Having problems with Dell? Inform yourself.

Dell started repairing my 3-year old E1705 back in September. I was having issues with lock ups and video corruption. I could hardly play a video game. As it turns out, this is a known issue for the E1705 and many older Dell systems shipped with nVidia graphics; there were manufacturing flaws in large numbers at nVidia causing the failure of the videocard. Dell never bothered to update the BIOS for this system and offered new models an added year warranty. Dell never told me about this issue and began replacing the system part by part, first the motherboard, then motherboard, graphics card, and LCD. The first replacement motherboard had faulty sound, the second damage to the power connector. The graphics card was downgraded to an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400, and the LCD ended up having a good sized spot that was greyish/white. We decided to replace it with "something comparable" - to them this was a Studio 17 with minimal specification. The system lacked 1920x1200 screen resolution, was over an inch wider on the base, the CPU didn't have Intel Virtualization, I had been downgraded from dual-channel memory configuration to single, and there might have been some other things. I pointed all this out to Dell and suggested the XPS 16 was a better match, considering the systems were in the same category at the top of Dell's lineup given consideration of how they went through a schema change for the names of the laptops and whatnot, and the overall power of my system gaming wise. They agreed - and the Studio 17 was replaced with a refurbished XPS 16... without virtualization support again. This was a big deal to me because I actually used this function, running Virtualbox and XP Mode. The Dell technician that ordered this laptop was shocked to find out this had been overlooked after I had pointed it out. Two months into this process, they finally said: Goto Dell.com and configure a new system that you find comparable. Here it was, and they just started building it today!!!

My old system for reference was:

Dell Inspiron E1705
Windows XP Professional
17" 1920x1200 8-bit panel
GeForce Go 7900 GS
512MB DDR2 (of course I had bought aftermarket 4GB)
60GB 7200RPM (I had bought aftermarket 320GB 7200RPM)

 

Congratulations! That is one sweet replacement!