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    New Dell Studio 1737 Disply problems

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by afzz, Mar 17, 2009.

  1. afzz

    afzz Newbie

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    Hello All,

    This is a long post, please excuse me for being so detailed :D

    I ordered a Dell Studio 1737 in January and received it on January 18th.

    The Basic Price was Rs 55,000 I customized it with the max features like second 500G Hard Drive, 4GB RAM, BluRay Reader and the price shot up to Rs.149,000 which is around $3000 US. The Sales Rep from Dell added a "Freebie" to my order, a Dell Bluetooth Mouse.

    The first day that I got the Noteboook, I noticed some wavy patterns on some websites. Specifically, these waves appeared on gradients which fade into white color. I initially ignored it for a few days thinking it was some website or firefox problems. On further investigation, I found the lines appearing even in Internet explorer and on Vista dialogue boxes too. This was around Feb 15. I upgraded the BIOS, VIDEO Drivers, MB drivers from Dell Website and Updated Vista with all available updates till date but the problem refused to go away. These lines do not appear on external displays connected to the notebook. Secondly, the hard drive on the front of the was making loud clank/click noises periodically and sometimes continuously for a minute or two.

    I have posted a video of the lines I just took with my digicam on Youtube at

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzIEWdOauQk

    The site on the Notebook screen in the video is http://flickr.com/tour/


    I complained to Dell about the lines and after an hour of troubleshooting on the phone. The tech support guy said the problem was most likely a faulty LCD Cable and said he would send a person to replace it. The next day a Dell Service person came calling with A New LCD and Motherboard. He spent an hour to replace the LCD and the lines were still there. Then he went on to replace the motherboard and got stuck with trying to open a screw that held the wireless card on the mb. After trying for sometime and damaging the screw, he called for help and another guy dropped in and he forcefully removed the screw with a pair of pliers and went on to change the mb.

    All this took well over 4hrs and the service guys had lost most of their patience and they started closing the system with Force and ended up forgetting to add some screws too. After all this, the lines refused to go away. Now they tried to download and install the Video/bios/mb drivers from the Dell website which I had already done before. The Service guy downloaded the drivers for dell 1735 when my notebook is 1737. The wrong drivers crashed the pc :mad: . Now he asked for the Drivers CD that came with my notebook and installed the drivers from that.

    Now the ordeal was 5 hrs old and they gave up and said that it was some sort of a Design Flaw with the Notebook itself and they would report this to Dell.

    I waited for a week and called up Dell again and to my surprise the Tech Support there felt that the issue has been sorted out last week itself when that was not the case. Again, went thru all the troubleshooting over the phone for an hour and finally the Tech support person blamed Windows Vista for the problem and told me to do a full system recovery. This was on a friday and I told him that i would do the system recovery over the weekend and report the results on Monday.

    I had accumilated a fair amount of data on the system by them and also had installed lot of applications. Therefore, I purchased a copy of Acronis True Image and a 500G External Hard Drive and imaged my Notebooks primary drive onto the external drive.

    After this, I recovered the system from the recovery partition and checked for the lines and they were still there. put back my image from the external drive and went on with my work.

    On Monday I called the tech support again and again went thru the troubleshooting phase over the phone and the tech support person to me he would send me another LCD and MB In a day. I also informed him of the clicking hard drive and he said he would replace that too.

    The Next day a service guy came with a lcd and motherboard in his backpack and a hard drive in a box. The first time, all these were brought in sealed boxes :confused: . I thought these were refurbed, but the guy gave assurance that they were new and went on replacing the MB, LCD and HDD. Now since the HDD was new he installed the OS from the Dell CD. He used a screwdriver to open the sticker on the driver cd and ended up scratching it. After Installing a New install of Vista+Driver+Upgraded Drivers from the web, the lines were still there.

    I suggested him to take the system out of my building to check if the lines were due to some ambient noise, maybe. He did that and the lines were still there. He then called up Dell and reported about this. The lady at dell could not help him and a colleague of hers took the call after 30 mins and he too was of no help. By this time I was infuriated and wanted to speak to the guy on phone. He told me that there was no problem with the notebook and it was a software problem and I had to purchase a separate support package for the software issues from Dell. I was even more infuriated by this and he spoke word like "Your Money Does Not Go Into My Pocket" and all that... :mad:

    I asked for a replacement of the Notebook and he clearly refused and said it was not possible to Replace it even though it is covered under Dell Complete Cover package for 3 years at an additional cost that I had paid. :eek:

    I banged the phone down after being frustrated of him. Now, the service guy was helpful and he called Dell again in 10 mins and went through troubleshooting again for an hour and finally, the dell support guy over the phone spoke to me and advised me to call customer support the next day and request for a replacement. I did that and they took a request and said they would escalate the case. After another week I got a call from Dell and have been requested to hand over the notebook back to them and upon handover, they would send me a New Notebook.

    I scheduled to handover the Notebook on Wednesday, 18th March(Tomorrow) and today (Tuesday) I got an Email from Dell saying that the design I have (Bunch O Surfers) is not available and Silver Palm rest is not available :mad: and I have to settle for a non-designer solid color Notebook and a Standard Palm Rest. Additionally, there is no Dell Network Connect Software, Different Version of MS Works, No Sound Blaster Audigy in the New Order which will take 8-10 days after Pickup tomorrow. :eek:

    The Sad part is that Dell does not trust a customer who has paid 150,000 rupees and gone through all of the above ordeal and want to pickup the notebook before starting to process the Replacement. :(

    Finally, to my question
    As i have seen lot of posts about Dell Sending Refurb Notebooks as Replacements on these forums, I am worried about handing over my Notebook tomorrow.

    What should I do? Please suggest.

    Thanks for your time in reading this.

    Cheers,
    AK
     
    afzz, Mar 17, 2009
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  2. afzz

    afzz Newbie

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    Got a Replacement today the lines on this are more than the previous one :mad: . Bad Dell Service. will never buy another Dell
     
    afzz, Mar 23, 2009
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