Three Questions: Complete Care, RAM, OS CD

1. Complete Care. Say I get 1 Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor. And say, a year down the road, I spill coffee on my laptop and it won’t boot. Would it be possible to add Complete Care then in order to have my laptop fixed? I’m thinking I won’t get Complete Care because, even if I drop my laptop, I could still probably use 1 Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor to fix it, as I doubt they could tell an internal error was caused by an accident, as opposed to defective parts. So, in what situation will the Dell tech say he can't fix my machine?
2. RAM. How hard is it to install your own RAM on the 1420? Is NewEgg’s RAM identical to Dell’s RAM? Or is installing your own RAM not worth the hassle?
3. OS CD. Will a new laptop come with a Vista Operating System CD so I can do a clean install of the OS?

 

1. if i understand you correctly then yea im sure you could just get a complete care service and the report your malfunctioning laptop.
2. Ram isnt that hard to install on most notebooks you just open up the memory bay and pop the ram in
3. im not sure about the os cd it could come with a recovery partition or a cd

 

1) No idea, sorry.

2) RAM is usually very easy to do. I've seen it get tricky with Latitudes, but since it's considered a user-upgradable part it can never be that tough. Make sure you get the right type of RAM (newegg has a search feature to do just that), and the computer will never know the difference. There should be tutorials for the new Inspirons popping up soon, I'd imagine.

3) When you order, make sure you select the "with media" option to get the Vista DVD. If you want to make sure, you can always call Dell and complain until they give it to you

 

it comes with a reinstilation disk and the same about the RAM

 

If it's anything but an accidental warranty, it's fluff IMO. If you spill coffee, forget it, no one's going to fix it unless you had accidental warranty. The complete whatever just means they'll come to your house to look at it instead of having you send it in. And I wouldn't bank on any stupidity on the part of the Dell tech; it really isn't that hard to tell if you dropped it, or if coffee was spilled on it.

So my advice to you: CALL a Dell sales rep, and ask him exactly what you asked here. Literally ask her, "lets assume I bought __ warranty and then spilled coffee on my laptop. What would happen." If you suspect they're feeding you some bull, ask for another rep, or hang up and call again. Personally, I wouldn't trust a reply from a forum on something important like a warranty.

 

1. Complete Care. From how I understand it, 1 Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor means exactly that: for one year, they will "come to your house" and fix your laptop.
2. RAM. So no one should ever get the 2GB option when configuring their laptop? They should just get 1GB from Dell and another 1GB from NewEgg.

 

Or 512 from Dell and 2 GB from Newegg or whoever's cheapest. I know Sirius posted a how-to for under-the-keyboard memory like on the new Inspirons in this forum; if you're concerned about the memory being difficult to upgrade, look that up.

 

I'm not sure about the new Notebooks, but on the Latitudes one bay was on the bottom, and the other was under the keyboard.

 

Too bad you cant get 512 MB (maybe 128 MB ) anymore as an option. You have to generally buy 2 GB separately because if you order 1 GB, they give you two 512s. The Dell's have two slots I assume, right?