james mckay dot net

Another phone call from Dell yesterday. Apparently my laptop’s motherboard was covered by the warranty. The “spillage” affects the screen, and looks like this:

This bit of rust in the bottom right hand corner of the screen chassis is supposedly causing discoloration across the whole display for about twenty seconds when it resumes from standby, or at lower brightness levels. This seems a bit far fetched to me, especially since the discoloration appears first on the left hand side of the screen when the brightness is turned down.

Incidentally, about a month ago, Dell settled in a class action lawsuit brought by owners of the same model of laptop as mine — the Inspiron 5150 — in the States. It has a reputation for getting so hot that it melts the case, trashes the motherboard and shuts down unexpectedly. The case on mine was intact, but it still felt a bit like having a fan heater sitting on your legs, and I did find it a bit annoying that it kept shutting down if anything worked the processor or the video card too hard. It seems a bit better since it was fixed, but it still gets pretty warm.

Still, it’s working again, and the discoloration is a relatively minor fault, certainly not one worth spending three hundred pounds on, so I won’t complain too much. Besides which, if the screen does go completely belly up, I can upgrade to a higher resolution one for a good bit less than what they were quoting.

Okay, now that’s wrapped it all up, perhaps I can somehow get on with the business of writing ten consecutive computer-free, geekiness-free, get-a-life blog entries…

Posted at 16:40 on 27 September 2006.
Tagged: customer support, Dell, laptop