Dell Studio 1737

rkan

Hi Guys, I bought a Dell Studio 1737 on June 12th 2009. In February this year the CD/DVD drive stopped reading disks. I spent a week trying to solve this by talking to Dell Technical Support on the phone, they remote connected to reinstall drivers etc and eventually they decided that it has a hardware issue and that they would need to collect it for repair. Dell arranged for courier to collect and i was told (on the phone) i would have the laptop back within 12 working days. The laptop did not arrive after 12 working days so i spent about another week ringing up every day asking what the story was but they were never able to give a straight answer as to when i'd get it back. It basically took a full month or about 20 working days to arrive.

I have just noticed this evening that the optical drive is not reading disks again and it doesn't sound too healthy. I have only 10 days of warranty left and i don't fancy sending it back and waiting a month again. Ideally i'd prefer a replacement or a refund at this stage. Apologies for the long post, look forward to any advice.

Cheers

ED E

Is it spinning up and then spinning down, scratching?

Do you support it when you insert disks?

rkan

Yes it starts to spin and then stops after about five seconds. It sounds like it could be scratching alright. It is one of the self loading drives like PS3 so the disk gets sucked in. there's no problem with inserting or ejecting the disks it's just that they are not getting read. Also when you click into drive it ejects the disk and says "Please insert disk" I've tried with music CD's, DVD's and data disks and it's the same for all.

ED E

Yeah, I'd go through a driver re-install. Again:p


Scratching on a normal drive usually just means the disk isnt seated right. On one of those auto drives there isnt really anything you can do to reseat it.

Option A: Jump in on the warranty
Option B: Replace the drive yourself*

*Everything dell is modular so it should be straightforward enough. I know the "normal" drives are a 30 second jobbie.

dilallio

I have the same issue but unfortunately mine failed (3rd failure) out of warranty.
Call them immediately and log the issue while it's in warranty.
It is not an easy task to change the self-loading optical drive in the 1737 - I've watched an experienced technician do it twice and there were loads of screws to be removed first.

I have a sneaky suspicion that when Dell replace parts, they use refurbished, and not new replacement parts.
So far I've had my optical drive replaced twice on the 1737 and it's now faulty again. I've had a video card replaced twice on a 1720 - the original replacement was faulty straight away. They sent out a replacement HDD for a 1545 which lasted 4 days and had to be replaced. I don't think I'm that unlucky and all laptops were used at home and not moved around at all.
I've always found their support excellent though, and their support site is brilliant for ease in downloading drivers, when compared to some other manufacturers.

ED E

Support is good alright. Monitor died, 2 days later a new one in a box, old one to be collected the following day:)

rkan

getting it repaired again under collect and return. The next question is do i extend the warranty. €189 for three years. If any other main components fail in the future they would probably cost nearly that much to fix i guess.

rkan

dilallio wrote: »

So far I've had my optical drive replaced twice on the 1737 and it's now faulty again.

I wonder was there any recall on these? They are not very reliable from my expierence, i would watch a dvd or burn a CD maybe once a month and i'll be on my second optical drive in less than 12 months. I could always get an external optical drive should it go again.