My XPS M1210 laptop is dead.

Bits of this post came from this other post I made on Neowin.net.

A few weeks ago my laptop started freezing. Didn't seem like anything abnormal at first until the lockups became a bit too frequent. I searched up this forum and found a couple of you guys reporting on symptoms with your M1210 that matched mine (lockup before the Vista orb), but I also experienced random lockups a few minutes into using the laptop and while using Ubuntu. I called up Dell Canada XPS support and explained my situation to the tech. He made me run through Dell's diagnostic tools, which took approximately six hours (the call lasted for only twenty minutes). No problems were detected. I even updated the webcam drivers to see if the lockups stopped. It did...

until three days ago. I was using this laptop in school when the screen blanked out. I forced it off, turned it on and was greeted with this nasty surprise:



I took the laptop home, removed the battery, and tried booting into Vista in safe mode. It worked, leading me to believe that something was seriously wrong with the GPU. I backed all my files up while calling the XPS support line to get this thing serviced. After I got off the phone with the tech (ended up waiting almost an hour to speak to the same guy I talked to a few days before) my laptop decided to clear up again. It went that way until two power cycles later when the screen went back to being all glitched up.

The laptop's now on its way to their service center. I'm anticipating either one of these things to happen:

• they detect it's a loose cable inside the laptop, put it back in, and ship it back (but isn't the GPU soldered onto the motherboard?)
• they somehow have spare M1210 motherboards lying around, replace it, and ship it back
• they ship me a new M1210 (if there's any available; this I wouldn't mind as the front bezel of the laptop that covers the speakers has its paint all worn off - again another problem reported by some users of this forum)
• they offer a M1330 as a replacement (I heard two of you guys had this happen)
• worst case: they don't do anything to it and ship it back as is (someone's getting their head yelled off if this happens

Interestingly enough all this happens almost exactly a year after I ordered this laptop. :/

 

good luck to you on this one. Dell support has never disappointed me thus far. My M1210's lcd died on me and they fixed it no problem. Total turn around time was 4 days from post office to post office.

 

hi.
I have my xps m1210. using well.
i want know how using the sim card on it?
thx

 

Just a question:

Is there a way to track the status of my repair through Dell's site instead of calling the XPS support line and giving them my work order number?

 

update: They fixed it within two days, from dropping it off at the Purolator office to my doorstep. They replaced the motherboard and hard drive. Great service.