Dell Quality, Warranty and Service

I have a Dell Latitude laptop - it is coming up 5 years old and still works fine. It had a 3 year Next Business day warranty and I extended that by another two years (£100 or so).

A couple of weeks back I notice two irregular areas on the screen - one with pixels being very dark and the other, very white.

Yesterday I called Dell and reported the fault along with a sloppy hinge.

Today, they arrived here - one look at the screen and agreed it was faulty - changed that and also changed the hinge assembly too. the screen is now ultrabright! and it seems as though the backlights were failing through old age.

I will certainly give 10/10 for reliability, support, and warranty.


Next time you think about a laptop - remember, cheap is not always cheapest in the long run and this may have cost more at day one, but after 5 years of 12 to 16 hours powered up every day, it has been extremely reliable and outseen many other laptops bought at teh same time.

I too have a good Dell (the Inspiron 6000) that is now just over six years old. Still a damn good machine. Not used very much as a portable, probably because the battery only lasts a matter of minutes these days! Must think about a new one I suppose.

The key thing here is Dells business machines (ie the Latitude range) and the desktops (Optiplex range) are pretty solid and reliable. Same also goes for HP. I have never had a problem with either Dell or HP, and when you do need support outside of warranty it is available on their websites. And spares etc are available on eBay etc for reasonable prices.

On the other hand if you want the fastest, latest spec then they do lag behind the market. I'm not a gamer so reliability is more important to me than the fastest processor/video card etc.

John

I have a Dell Latitude E5500 laptop, which is just over one year old. It is solid and ultra-reliable for all my needs.

I also have a Dell OptiPlex GX1 for a desktop, which is coming up to be twelve years old. It's a dependable, old faithful. It will only be retired when the OS, RHEL 5, reaches EOL.

I'm hoping the laptop (OS RHEL 6) gives me similar service.

Had one of these for about eight months now.

Very good quality. Three year part and labour warranty as standard from Dell.

I have a Dell Latitude D820 for work. It is about 4.5 years old and so far has had the screen replaced, motherboard replaced, keyboard/trackpad replaced and battery replaced.

However, it is still more powerful than most of the new laptops bought by the company, has a brilliant screen and is lovely to use (just rather heavy to carry!).

Most laptops in my experience will last for a long term, even the bargain basement ones. However, when they do go wrong it is good to have good backup - only reasons I moved away from Dell for personal use were that the laptops weren't high enough spec (except Alienware which are expensive) and that the desktops use some proprietary components which can be very expensive to replace.

All this talk of Dell laptops caused me to find a daughter's old Dell from behind the loft eaves.

It is an Inspiron 3000 which she had for Uni (about 13 yrs ago I guess) - anyway I plugged it in and turned on and it booted 2nd time. First time with a message that the last boot failed so I pressed F1 and up it came with the long forgotten Windows 98 logo!

130 mb of Ram and a 3GB hard drive. All I had to do was reset the date and time amazing really.
Not sure what I'll do with it now mind you

Bung Linux on it.