Received my new 1520... Refurb from Ebay

It was an excellent purchase. I found one with a WSXGA screen and it looks beautiful. No headphone noise either! My only 2 complaints are the loose lid problem (that I've seen twice now on these 1520) and the wobbly battery (I don't really know if that's going to matter any). I would say that anyone who is thinking about dumping their month+ long wait to take a look at the refurbished lot of 1520s.

Also, does anyone has any idea how to fix the loose screen latch?

 

Try calling Delltech support, they should know how to fix that and for the wobbling battery I believe they should replace that. Try calling them at this # 1-800-822-8965.

 

by the loose lid do you mean that it doesn't completly latch down? Mine closes but I can push it down a little bit. Its not to big of concern and I really don't want to send it in. But is that something they would fix if i contacted them?

 

what did you pay on ebay?? what other specs did you get?? thanks

 

Out of curiousity, why did you buy a refub off of Ebay instead of Dell Outlet??

 

Well, I didn't even realize that Dell had decent refurbs for sale (I thought that the model was too new for them to have many refurbs)... But even after I looked I realized that I wasn't going to get as good as the deal I got on Ebay.

Umm... The lid problem is not that it won't latch, it is that there is still a gap between the lid and the base when fully closed. This gap allows the lid to rattle against the base. What I've done as a temporary fix is to put little rubber stoppers (about 2 mm thick) on the corners of the base to make contact with the rubber stoppers on the lid. This has minimized the rattling, but there is still a gap. I thought that this was a workmanship issue, but after investigating it further, now I think it was designed this way. When you look at the latch mechanism, there is about a 1 cm gap between the top of the "hook" and the lid. The base however only has a tiny bit of plastic to hold on to, maybe 3 mm. The extra 7 mm (1cm - 3mm) creates the gap which causes the rattling between the lid and the base.

For my specs, check my sig... $1250 w/ a free laptop bag.

 

Here are some pictures to show the problem...

This is the latch on the top of the lid.


This is the hole on the base near the touchpad.


It looks to me like they specifically designed this laptop to have a gap between the lid and base.

 

Your images don't show up for me, I the url for them is broken.

Yes it is designed for there to be a gap between the lid and the base. That is how it is on all of the Inspirons/Vostros. So Dell won't fix that, and it really should be a non-issue, it won't hurt the laptop to wiggle around.

 

they are all like that ive seen a ton now and had 3 myself they were all that way some were worse than others but they all had a gap