Tesco Dell Warranty?

fox2319

I got one of the quad core dell's at tesco a few months ago and installed some extra RAM and a 9800GT in it and all has been great until recently.

In the past week or so, it has taken a very long time to boot. This coincided with the death of a secondary hard disk (which I took out and replaced using an external disk).

The main symptom is that from power on to the login screen takes the best part of 5-10 mins. A lot of this is spent on the dell splash screen. A quick search online suggest that this may be down to a duff capacitor near the large power connector on the mobo so I suspect that I need a new board.

My questions are:
1 - Assuming Dell do a collect & return service, how long will it take?
2 - Will the fact that I added RAM and a grfx card matter (I'd take the card out anyway but I no longer have the original RAM)

Thanks for any replies

Browntoa

my understanding is that the replacement of ram or adding drives is expected on a PC unit and in no way invalidates the the warranty (although they may try and argue that)

sunshine54

adding ram is allowed as there is a removable panel to access the slots, but i think a grapic card is a bit more intrusive and probabily invalidates the warranty. Did you use electrostatic wristbands?

Browntoa

graphics card just pushes in a PCI slot , no more intrusive than ram fitting

Dell often talk you through opening the case and reseating PCI cards when you ring up with problems

bingo_bango

I have a feeling sunshine is talking about a laptop, while everyone else is discussing a PC, in which case they're right.

Browntoa

just found this on Dells own support

STEP: Reseat the Video Card(s)

1. Power the system off and unplug the power cable.
2. Press and hold the power button for five (5) seconds to drain power reserves.
3. Open the computer case.
4. Disconnect any internal power connectors running from the power supply to the video card(s).
5. Reseat the video card.
6. If there is a second video card, reseat the second video card as well.
7. Reconnect any applicable internal power connectors to the video card(s).
8. Close the computer case.
9. Plug the power cable into the computer and press the power button.

so their own help pages tell you to open and reseat cards

fox2319

Ta for the replies. Yes, it's a desktop and I'll probably remove the graphics card anyway before I send it off. Will give them a call soon and see how it goes - fingers crossed...

fox2319

loaner wrote: »

Is the bios still searching for the old secondary disk/memory check? It's a big jump to diagnose that a long boot time = faulty capacitor, try safe mode.

Damned internet! I had looked into plugging / unplugging various bits and did have a quick peek at the BIOS but as the thing was hanging on the Dell splash screen for a good few minutes, I believed what I found on a site on the internet where someone had exactly the same problem as me with apparently the same machine, his had been diagnosed down to a capacitor by the large PSU connector to the mobo so I thought mine was the same.
However, on going further into boot priorities in the BIOS and moving the HDD up to the top, it looks like my system was hanging for a good few minutes trying to find a bootable OS on the external HDD I'd bought to replace the duff internal one. So I'm back down to a 'normal' vista boot time.
Thanks for the help peeps. Now the big question is whether to try breaking my PC again by putting in the Windows 7 x64 beta