Another DELL disaster, any advice please??

pavnicky

In July 2009 I purchased a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop direct from Dell, which I gave to my daughter last year for Chirstmas. I bought it in July as they had an offer on for a free colour upgrade at that time.

My daughter complained this week that it was running slow and sluggish, so I took it to a computer repairer for inspection. He informed me that he would need the recovery discs to repair the laptop, which I gave him.

Today I discovered that he has tried the recovery discs on numerous occasions on the laptop and they would not work, and on investigating further he has discovered that the hard drive has in fact 'had it', and that on inspection that it is actually a hard drive that is more than four years old which in his opinion has been reconditioned. He asked if I bought it second hand, to which of course I replied no.

So now I am stuck with a laptop that I purchased only thirteen months ago, only been used for eight months, that I am facing a huge repair bill for. I don't where I stand with Dell if anywhere, as obviously it is more than a year since I purchased it, but surely things that cost £379 should last a bit more than this??

Very unhappy, any advice on how to deal with this would be appreciated, thank you in advance,

N

christech81

Hello pavnicky

Sorry to hear of your experience with the Dell laptop. In my experience Dell are a very good and reliable manufacturer of desktops and laptop PC's.

Your laptop was running slowly and the "computer expert" claimed he could solve that but wanted the recovery discs to then stated the hard drive was at fault.

Normally with hard drives the process of degradation is gradual and can sometimes be identified with read errors or files missing / not available.

Over time all PC's slow down for various reasons, that's the nature of the beast.

Not that I doubt your repairer but have you seen the drive ? Most drives have a manufacture date stamped on the label, if not him the interface, make, model, capacity and serial number of the drive.

If the drive really is "kaput" then it shouldn't cost a great deal of money to obtain a new one and maybe within your ability to install it (?). The difficulty for you would be to ensure that the data comes across from the old drive to the new; assuming the repair man hasn't wiped what was already on the disk.

Obviously you can take a more direct route and simply contact Dell to query them directly with your findings, see if they can do anything as a gesture of goodwill.

Given the product type and cost the expected life ought to be far greater than you have experienced so on that basis you could always write to Dell quoting Sale Of Goods Act. Finally, if you paid by credit card you could always contain the card company and hold them jointly responsible and they may peruse the supplier under section 75.

Hope this helps.

pavnicky

Thank you so much for replying.

The date on the hard drive is four years old, and I did pay by credit card so hope fully I will get some assistance when I ring Dell today.

We have put all the information stored on the laptop onto a external hard drive so my daughter does not lose any of her files. The laptop had to be cleared as unfortunately it had a virus.

Many thanks for your help again,

N

Zandoni

If you go to the Hard drive manufacturers site you may be able to check it's warranty.

Have you spoke to Dell yet?

Has your Laptop had any other repair since you had it?

pavnicky

Thank you for replying.

I tried to call Dell today but they are closed on the weekend, so will try after the Bank holiday on Tuesday.

There have been no other faults with the lap top, its only been in use for eight months, my daughter who uses it is eleven and only uses it for an hour every other day or so.

N

smcaul

Do you know I had a Dell Insperion 15 in fo repiar this week as well, the owner did not have the recovery discs and it would not let me recover from the recovery partition. After scratching my head for a good few hours as this one was showing all the signs of a failed hard drive it turns out that you have to set the BIOS to use ATA disc and not the one it defaults to (your repairer should understand this), once this change was made I was able to reload the operating system without a problem.

Ask if he has tried this, without doing it I could not boot from the DVD drive, it would get to a certain point then just hang.

HTH.

Zanzibar

Hi, this sounds a bit odd - all Dells are made to order - they never have stock of any parts - let alone years old parts - it doesn't make sense.

Check the specification of that laptop to be sure someone hasn't swapped out the drive for another one at some point.

You do this by entering the Dell service tag number (on the bottom of the laptop) here:

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/details?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~ck=anavml


It will say when it was shipped and under the 'Original System Configuration' tab the size of the drive - check it matches yours.

Also you generally don't need restore disks - there is a restore partition on Dells that restore the system back to factory settings - you computer bod should have known that Id have thought.


If it comes down to it all part serial numbers are recorded at Dell for every build so in theory they should be able to tell you what made up your laptop. Out of interest what is the make of that drive?