M1330: got myself a re-fur-bished mobo...

"I've seen her refurbished twice!"
Yeah well, not nearly as good as Art Brut's original verse, but it pretty much sums it up. So does this:

The power / HDD access / Battery charging indicator LED Shroud, for lack of a better term, is missing.

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I'm on my third mobo now, the first having kicked the bucket thanks to a R.I.P. GPU, the second having, ah, fried itself (read: internal power supply system fault).

So the first replacement came in a box labeled "Refurbished" in big, bold letters. For starters, the GPU had a big, fat fingerprint on it (argh.) But ok, I accepted the fact that Dell deals with refurbished parts and I moved on.

On... to the tests. I tested all the items the Rep has to manually reconnect (see my mobo replacement check list). After I was satisfied, I sent him on his merry way but continued to test all the on-board ports. To my dismay, I discovered that the firewire port had a faulty contact and I could only get it to work if I jammed the cable at a certain angle & then didn't move anything... .

I was not happy. I even wrote up my one & only I-hate-my-1330 post on account of it. But I wasn't prepared to get another mobo just for that & figured my GPU would R.I.P. soon again anyways... .

So, I moved on and learned to love my 1330 again... . That is, until the internal power supply died a few weeks ago.

So this time I went through a more extensive checklist while the poor Rep waited and this time really tested every single port & interface. Everything worked, so I gave the Rep a generous tip & sent him off on his merry way.

Everything was fine, all benchmarks and thermal tests passed with flying colors, I reapplied the Cu Mod, loaded the latest BIOS etc. I was very happy, with everything. Almost everything... . I just couldn't ignore the fact that for the first time, the blue LED power / HDD access / Battery charging indicators were somehow annoying...?!? And contrary to many, I love even the blinding-bright blue LED on the power supply "brick" (lol).

So then I had a closer look and came to the conclusion that the light source was bleeding onto the other components (such as the mic jack, Media card, etc.) as well as seeping through the case's joints. So my first thought was that the repGuy didn't snap something properly in place. So then I took a look at some pics I took of the old & new mobos and what do I see? A missing part! Yep, the LED Shroud, for lack of a better term, was missing.... arrrrrrrgh!

I took pics of the seepage, the mobo with shroud and the one without. I'll be frank: although it's not a functional attribute, it still bothers me... but I can't imagine swapping out the mobo again, just for that small piece of styrofoam...

I'm thinking of calling my local rep & asking him to swipe it off the next faulty mobo he replaces... what do you think, what would you do?

P.S. Can anyone venture a guess as to why the NBR mods moved this thread out of XPS and into Customer Service...?

 

That's a lot of motherboard replacements. Yeah, I would ask if they could just send you the shroud, express delivery.

Is there any way you could fashion something from cardboard that would accomplish the same thing? Just tape it in place inside.

 

Well I couldn't ask Dell that because I'm an "end-user" and this is not a Customer-replaceable part. Believe it or not, they probably would just assume send me another mobo, something that I don't want - 'cause it will have it's own problem(s), to be sure...

But maybe the third-party Rep can order it, or at least remove it from a defective mobo. I'm going to send him the pics & let's see what he can do for me...

 

Sigh, my third replacement mobo has just been ordered. All because of a missing $2 part...

I will however make a suggestion to the rep guy that he simply transfer the shroud from the replacement mobo on to the existing (and tested!) mobo instead of completely replacing the mobo. I had a "1-2-1" with the XPS hotline person and he told me that they don't track Mobo replacement serial numbers so that they won't care which mobo they get back (...so long as they get one back )

 

Would you believe it, the replacement mobo also came without a shroud! Fortunately for me, the RepGuy had done his homework and swiped a shroud off a [defective] mobo that was laying around so he managed to save the day

If you're wondering if this thing really makes a difference than see for yourself:

A pic without the shroud and a pic with the shroud.

FWIW, both replacement mobos were A00s... (my former, "with shroud" mobos being A01 & A04s).