Issues with my mom's Inspiron 1525

Basic back-story, my moms Inspiron 1525 has not been working very well lately, so she dropped it off at my house. As far as I can tell, it was bought in July 2008, and has warranty coverage through July 2011.

After poking around a bit, and creating an Acronis TI backup of her entire HD, I decided to do the Dell Factory Restore option. For the most part this alleviated most of the issues, but I was still noticing a little flakiness. I ran the Diagnostic utilities, and got some errors, most notably:

0F00:0232 Timeout waiting for IRQ (hard drive) errors.

So it seems she has a hard drive on the verge of failing.

Let me preface by saying my mom is pretty computer illiterate, I don't even know why she has a notebook, but anyway, a couple questions...

Will I be able to call Dell with her service tag info and get a replacement hard drive?

Will I end up with a new empty HD and have to install Vista and everything from scratch, or is it possible to get them to send a HD with the recovery partition already setup?

Thanks in advance.

 

1) Since you're under warranty 'til 2011, they should pretty much repair the thing for free until then, this issue included.

2) I think this'll depend on how you get the hard drive replaced. If they just send you a new HDD, it'll probably be blank. If you send the machine back or have a tech replace the drive, they'll probably set it up for you. Not 100% sure on this one, though.

 

I'm assuming (hoping) that the extended warranty coverage is thru Dell and not a retailer? If so, you'll need to determine whether it is the standard 'Mail-In' service or In-Home service. Here's a link to where you can double check that info- http://support.dell.com/support/top...info/details?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=anavml

Once you've established that, I suggest contacting Dell via CHAT. That way you have a saved copy of the entire conversation. It's also great to have the chat log to refer to while they're walking you thru any troubleshooting or diagnostics.

Tell them that you prefer having a replacement hard drive sent for 'user replacement'. Be sure to ask them whether it will arrive as an empty drive or will it be identical to the factory image of the original one (how it came out of the box new)!

If you were to send it to them for repair, they would return it with everything installed (factory image). But they can take weeks to process it and get it back to you.

 

I've got my own Dell notebooks, so I've dealt with them on chat before, I just wasn't sure if they would even allow me to handle this issue, since it's not my notebook. If it were my own system, I would just get the blank hard drive and set it up myself, but I think it's best for my mom to just have it as it originally was.

Anyway, the results were very successful, no issues about it not being my notebook, and they agreed to send a replacement drive with the OS preinstalled.

The highlights of the chat:

 

GREAT! I'm glad to hear that they handled it without a hassle! Hopefully the new drive will resolve everything.