Dell PC

jackyann

Just to say I'm fed up as our PC, which cost £700 2 years ago has crashed yet again. It had 3 new hard drives whilst under warranty - the last one has just lasted a year. Dell refuse any responsibility, and have said the computer was "fit for purpose" and are quite happy for us to post reviews saying this (I don't suppose they are, but they mean they are not prepared to give us another hard drive)
Thank goodness we have an external hard drive and backed up regularly.
Now to decide which PC to risk our money on......

NiftyDigits

Fit your own HDD for £50 or less?

zappahey

Or I'll give you £50 for it.

Seriously, fit a new drive in it yourself.

Is it a desktop or a laptop?

closed

fail or corrupt?

To have 3 hard disks fail in 2 years is incredibly unlucky, the same brand of hard disk may be in your external drive or a new machine

Banacek

I know how you feel I have a three year old Dell Vostro and its on its third hard drive.

John_Gray

Dell simply buy in disks for installation on their PCs from whichever manufacturer is offering a good deal at the time. Sometimes they get a bad batch. You seem to have been considerably more unlucky than most. We must have had 35 Dell PCs over the last six years at work (still have 25) and never had a hard disk failure. (Motherboards is a different matter...)

Mr_Toad

Another vote for you fitting a new HDD yourself.

Don't write off a perfectly good machine because one component, one of the hardest work components, has died.

Lum

Dell PCs are at least easy to work on. If you open it up the hard drive will have two cables going into it that only go on in one direction. It will also be mounted on green slide rails that you can just slide it out on.

Buy a new hard drive, take the rails off your old drive and bolt them to the new one, slide it back in and plug the cables back in.. it's pretty simple for anyone who owns a philips screwdriver.

Reinstalling windows may be a little harder. Do you have the recovery CD?

spannerzone

Lum wrote: »

Dell PCs are at least easy to work on. If you open it up the hard drive will have two cables going into it that only go on in one direction. It will also be mounted on green slide rails that you can just slide it out on.

Buy a new hard drive, take the rails off your old drive and bolt them to the new one, slide it back in and plug the cables back in.. it's pretty simple for anyone who owns a philips screwdriver.

Reinstalling windows may be a little harder. Do you have the recovery CD?

Unless it's a Dell that was mode since about 2008 where many of their PC's went to using more standard ATX style cases (not quite ATX standard but almost the same) and sadly the drives are screwed in, not that it's actually that hard to access them to replace.

I've have various Dell PC's as have family members and not had a hard drive failure yet.

Lum

ugh, that shows how out of date all the kit at my workplace is! Thanks for the update.

Honestly having those things on sliderails is about the only reason I like working with dells in the workplace, makes it much faster.

spannerzone

Lum wrote: »

ugh, that shows how out of date all the kit at my workplace is! Thanks for the update.

Honestly having those things on sliderails is about the only reason I like working with dells in the workplace, makes it much faster.

I can't say that the higher spec Dell business desktops don't still come with the drive rails but certainly the Vostro (budget 'business' desktops) and their other home desktops all changed from around 2008 ish....