Dell Laptop dead

Heroditas

Some of you may remember that my Inspiron 1720 had issues two months ago and eventually I got it repaired by reinstalling Vista and isolating the bad sectors of the hard drive. (Bought the laptop in August)
Anyway, for the last couple of days the laptop started "hanging" quite regularly until last night when the hard drive would completely freeze and the indicator light went out. As a result, I spent the evening powering it down, running the "startup check" function and then running chkdsk. This was done a few times until finally the computer won't even run chkdsk at all and states that an unknown error has occurred when it tries to run this.

I've finally accepted the drive is kaput but seeing that I bought it in PC World and they were of absolutely no help the last time (Their advice was "ring Dell") do I ring Dell Technical Support in Ireland or do I have to ring them in the UK?
Also, what sort of procedure can I expect? Will I have to run some checks over the phone and then send the drive back to them and they'll send me a replacement one?

thebman

If its under a year old and you have a receipt, tell Pc world, you didn't buy from Dell, you bought from them.

They'll probably just ship it to Dell though so I don't know if its worth the hassle if Dell will fix it direct.

Black_Knight

UK dell, Irish dell, its all new delhi in the end!

Your just going to be rerouted to India in the end so ring Irish dell. They will ask you for your service tag (on the back/bottom of your laptop). Then they will ask whats up, you tell em, they do certain checks and tests over the phone and go from there.

I rang em up a few weeks ago, got meself a new motherboard and DVD drive after about 45minutes.
A guy came out and replaced them at my house the next day, so I guess this is what they will do for you. Ask them about getting your info off the hard drive.

Heroditas

Black_Knight wrote: »

UK dell, Irish dell, its all new delhi in the end!

Your just going to be rerouted to India in the end so ring Irish dell. They will ask you for your service tag (on the back/bottom of your laptop). Then they will ask whats up, you tell em, they do certain checks and tests over the phone and go from there.

I rang em up a few weeks ago, got meself a new motherboard and DVD drive after about 45minutes.
A guy came out and replaced them at my house the next day, so I guess this is what they will do for you. Ask them about getting your info off the hard drive.

Cool. Thanks a million.

If its under a year old and you have a receipt, tell Pc world, you didn't buy from Dell, you bought from them.

They'll probably just ship it to Dell though so I don't know if its worth the hassle if Dell will fix it direct.

LAst time it happened, I went to the "PC Repair Centre" in PC World up near Liffey Valley and they told me to ring their Customer Care department in the UK. The guy did a little "diagnosis" over the phone and his solution was "you're gonna have to ring Dell themselves". Great lot of help that was. I eventually fixed it myself :rolleyes:

This time though, I have a feeling it's completely gone. I thought it was inevitable but had hoped it would last a bit longer.

Heroditas

I think I'm going to call this laptop "Lazarus". Managed to carry out a startup scan and then a chekdsk and the problem appeared fixed. Laptop then died again so I again repeated the checks. This happened twice this afternoon.

Finally, after the checks were done and a multitude of errors were repaired, I carried out a system restore and it's been working ok since.
The PC had updated automatically yesterday and that was the start of the woes. Hmmmm, very curious. Still think I need to contact Dell though

Heroditas

It died again on Tuesday night with the old problem of the HDD hanging - got it booted again and this kept repeating.
Rang Dell's customer care/technical support yesterday evening and was on the phone for an hour (20mins on hold) while the techie got me to run several checks using the Driver disk. Eventually he told me he'd ring me back this morning between 11 and 12 because the technical checks were taking far too long and told me to take a note of any errors. I continued carrying out the checks but the laptop kept hanging so I eventually called it a night.

Sure enough, the guy rang me this morning at 11.05 and after I gave him the errors (0F00:0232 during the read test was one of them) , he instantly said I needed a replacement drive and I would have it delivered to me tomorrow morning!
I have all my stuff backed up anyway so it'll be a relatively simple job to swap drives and then reinstall all the software.

Heroditas

To close off the story, the replacement HDD arrived ealry Friday afternoon and I installed Vista on it (without installing the pesky partition), the necessary drivers and then my software.

It's working like a dream now.

Very impressed with the way Dell handled this promptly. :cool:

KamiKazi

Dell tech support certainly seemed to have gotten their act together compared to when I had my xps laptop.

whatahw

The same thing started happening my XPS M1330 last week. The whole system basically freezes after about 15 mins of no input.

Emailed Dell, carried out the diagnostic tests and got several "0F00:0232" errors during the Read Test. Dell are sending me out a replacement drive next week.

Heroditas, just out of curiosity, what type was your failed HDD? The one I have is a 320GB Western Digital. I don't know why it started to fail. The laptop was never dropped or bumped.

okee

Heroditas wrote: »

Very impressed with the way Dell handled this promptly. :cool:

Technically they should have sent an engineer to fit it and got your system
back up and running like new. I've seen them try this with users with no knowledge of pc hardware, they send them the part and then the user has to pay some local engineer to fit it. I've had to argue the point before they agreed
to send their own engineer to fit it.