Whoo Hoo! I'm getting a new laptop!

[Bret]

This is so cool! /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/cool.gif This has never happened to me - I actually made out on a warranty. I'm the guy that usually has the item break down the day "after" the warranty expires.

I guess my work Laptop finally nickel’ed & dimed the Dell Gold service contract to the point that their going to give me a new one. Now I don’t know what my employer had to pay for the Gold service but to Dell’s credit they have honored the service agreement time & time again and never left me disappointed or wanting for better service. Truthfully whatever they did pay it worked out pretty good for them because we field service engineers are pretty rough on laptops & equipment between traveling and having to remotely log on to our company’s internal network, interfacing with customers, conducting business and taking care of personal while on the road (banking, emailing family members, teachers and the BCF /bcforum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/wink.gif ) my computer is on about 15 to 20 hours a day.

Anyway the reason for the replacement is because my 3+ year old Dell Latitude D600 has had well over 7-8 service calls last year (two HDs, Mother Board, two keypads, a couple of batteries and two LCD screens) they’ve decided that it’d be cheaper to just give me a new computer. Another reason for the new laptop is that I was told they don’t do the D600’s anymore – so I’ll be getting either a D620 or a D820 depending on the features. Truthfully even with all these problems over the years I’ve never really complained about my laptop because as I said my laptop has seem a lot of miles & abuse.

Don’t ya wish car manufactures did that willingly without having to drag their sorry carcasses into litigation.

 

[ccougill]

I've had the Dell service agreement on my dell desktop, and the one time I've needed it they were here with the correct parts within 24 hours of my calling them. That was one quick trip from India, but I have no complaints

 

[aerog]

Give us a report when you decide which one to get. I'm in the market for another one myself. My 3 y/o Sager Pentium 4 is heading toward being named the "back up" computer.

I've had one hard-drive failure (not sure it was 100% failed but it screwed up on me big time, I reformatted it as a back-up and replaced it with a new 100gb one), one battery get down to where it would only run 20-30 minutes, the multimedia card reader came unplugged, and I had one 512mb stick of RAM get flaky (worked fine until it got hot then it'd crash). I also had a nuisance problem with the screen, it would flicker slightly at certain brightness settings - I took it apart and cleaned the connectors, seemed to take care of it for about 8 months then I had to do it again.

The only maintenance I've done is to completely disassemble and clean the computer, pull the processor/head-sink assembly and clean it, clean the fans, etc.

I'm always interested to hear how different laptop hinges and screen supports are doing after a couple of years use. I had two Dells that were horrible, one that was fair, and the Sager has been good. Sitting on a desk they all seem to be ok, but bouncing around in the airplane for hundreds of hours (I think the Sager has about 550 airplane hours on it now) is akin to those abusive product-test robots you see on TV!

PS: I know we covered laptop purchases a couple of months ago, but if anyone has any suggestions on a good medium to top end one with a high res wide screen I'd be interested to hear about it. When I get the new machine I want to run my video on one half and camera control on the other.