Sending your laptop in for repair under warranty? My inspiron 7577 went through it for you

Well, gather around everyone... its been a while since I have felt the need to make a post here, but this was just too good, and I never pass up an opportunity to give bad PR to people/companies who rightly deserve it.

I was having an issue with blue-screens and weird graphical artifacts almost exactly a year ago, and shipped my machine off for repair. The ticket said they replaced the motherboard, and the heatsync.

While on the road over the holidays, I attempted some gaming and was unable to keep my CPU under 90c (wayy too hot for my liking!!) so I decided to take it down and re-paste it with the trusty IC-diamond this morning, since I have been putting it off for a while.

NOTE: I hadn't even removed the bottom panel myself until today.

After I got the bottom panel off I could see 2 missing screws without going any farther, I think there was a total of 5 missing. Under the bottom cover, there were also deep scratches from someone prying to get the back 'vent' piece off which covers the heatsink exhaust, but its hidden when the machine is together, so no big deal I guess.

WHAT KIND OF HAM-FISTED, TWO LEFT FEET HAVING, COKE BOTTOM GLASSES WEARING FOOL, WOULD DO THIS TO A DEFENSELESS LAPTOP?! This is one of the reasons I'm closely following this right to repair bill... hope it passes!

If you can't get the first screw out without stripping it all to hell, and you do the same to the second, and so on... either replace them or quit while you are ahead, and DO NOT put those same stripped screws back in WITH a fresh coat of blue locktite. effing hell!

Dell needs some QC on their Louisiana repair depot, and I just KNOW someone woke up wondering why their ears were red... well bud, it was me cussing your name.


SEE THIS CRAP? I would say about a quarter of the screws in the machine were stripped pretty bad, these were the worst, and I had to remove them with a tiny flat blade, and the dimwits put fresh blue lock-tight on them too!


Pretty typical factory goo job... can't complain a whole lot.


Thankfully I keep some laptop screws on hand, I get asked to fix a lot of things, probably by people who are sick of companies screwing them over.



So the image below shows this sticky material crap dell puts to bridge the fans to the heatsync, I'm guessing to keep pressurized air from escaping before it goes through the heat sync? Well, it doesn't work so well when the adhesive de-laminates and traps huge dust bunnies right there in front of your fan, that was part of my problem, even though I'm pretty religious about keeping it blasted with canned air. Whatever they put on there was either very poorly engineered, or was never supposed to be applied to that part of the machine in the first place.... still scratching my head over that one.





Here's my replacement for Dell's very sticky fabric piece, and its not the first time I have done this with good results. All the gaps are plugged where the fan connects to the heat sync, and I was careful to do it in such a way the adhesive wouldn't be exposed to, or collect the dust constantly being pumped by it. I think the extra 20 minutes was worth it seeing as I don't want to tear this machine down again for a LOOONG time.




All back together, now... and it even survived my 'static safe' carpet and the bed I used as a work space LOL (I know I know.... but hey, if the dell guy didn't kill it, must be pretty tough, and I had crap on my desk!)

Before, prime95 would push my temps past 95c within a few seconds, and make me worried enough about it to shut it off (small FFT, so max heat right away) and that was even with it undervolted! The stress test in the image below has been running for over an hour and hasn't broken 83c running the very same test, and I haven't even tried undervolting yet, so I would say my endeavor was a massive success!

*edit* Holy crap, undvervolted to -0.110v its sitting in the 68c-69c range! I know this laptop has a well designed thermal solution, but woww. I'm starting to regret not doing this much sooner. Seems to go a little higher when using the GPU and CPU due to the shared pipes, but that's far better than what I have been getting for a year now.
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