Vostro 1400: Creaky Harddrive

Its been 4 days that I've been using my Vostro 1400 without any problems. No noisy headphone jack, no dead pixels or grainy screen. Although, it does have a wobbly battery & noisy cd-drive, I wasn't in a mood to go through to the whole process of cancelling & re-ordering and then playing the 'waiting game'

But, yesterday, I noticed my harddrive making a creaky noise. Its not loud enough to be audible outdoors, but you can certainly notice it in a study room or library.

I'm on verge of returning my 1500 (due to a different set of problems), and now its the 1400. I'll be without a laptop

Here's a list of problems with my 1400:
-------------------------------------
6-cell wobbly battery (ok, no biggie)
Significant backlight bleed (can live with it)
Noisy cd-drive (annoying but ok)
Creaky hardrive (worrysome )

Factors to be considered:
-------------------------
Need a laptop by August end
WXSGA with TrueLife has an order backlog
Based on my config., 1400 is now cheaper by $32

 

I believe the wobbly battery issue has been addressed for all the new batches. As far as the noisy drive? I got a Pioneer drive in my vostro 1400 and it is dead silent ( I kid you not...). I went with matte screen and almost no bleed even with a black background.

Edit: Mine came with the toshiba 120 GB and after I turned off defender, indexing, superfetch and system restore... the drive stays idle when the computer is not being used.

 

By creaky do you mean very short bursts of "electronic" noise? (as opposed to the regular mechanical clicking).

Mine's been bothering me with that kind of sound ...

 

I have the Optiarc DVD drive (Sony) and its quite loud too... could you check what type of drive you have? If you contact Dell Support they may be able to just ship you a new HD etc

 

That reminds me. I don't really notice the sound of my HDD

 

I had the Sony drive as well in my old 1400 and with the replacement I have the Pioneer. It's just so much quieter now.

 

Its the "clicking" noise, but its too loud to be considered regular. Usually, desktop harddrives do make a lot of clicking noise, which i consider normal. But, at this noticeable loudness, i'm a bit worried.

The noise is audible only when there's harddrive activity. I'm not sure what you mean by "electronic noise"

Its a toshiba hdd. Anyone else faces this 'problem'?

 

The battery wobble issue has been addressed? I thought that people who got replacement systems complained of the same thing.

 

I'm not sure if Dell does this, but I had an HP that I replaced because of a bad screen and I was in a similar situation to yours because I needed mine ASAP. I explained it to the CSR and they moved me to the front of the order line and gave me free two day shipping and I got my new laptop in a little over a week.

 

update: I just returned it.

Suprisingly, the rep didn't even give me a counter-offer or anything of that sort. He was like "Alright, I'll set up for a return for as early as tomorrow". Lol. Is that normal or is that just because Dell is selling enough of these things.

PS: The price for 1500 similar to my specs has gone up by almost $200