Dell Laptop warranty/ what's your experience?

**bosstone74** · 06-27-2004, 06:09 PM

My friend has a Dell laptop, I went to visit him over the weekend, and used this Smell laptop....I mean Dell laptop. This computer froze up on me over 20 times. When I asked about it, he told me he purchased the extended 5 year warranty for the comp, and has not gotten ANY good help from dell. He even went as far as writting a certified to Mike Dell himself, which of course didn't get a reply.

I took and did a clean install and updated everything. They did send him new RAM and had him install it but to no avail. When he spoke with the tech support people at Dell, they said the wouldn't do anything for him. (even though he purchased a 5 year extended warranty)

What's your experiences with Dell's warranty plan, and is there and tips, tricks, or suggestions you have so that they will take the comp in and fix this pile?

thanks!

BossTone74

**SupaDave** · 06-28-2004, 07:52 PM

I've had pretty good experiences with Dell's warranty service. I had 3 year on site service, and was always pleased. Granted, sometimes it took a while to get the service call placed (due to me taking my time and Dell's troubleshooting scripts the techs have to use), but every problem has always been resolved.

This may not speak very well for Dell quality, but in the 3 (4?) years I've had this laptop, I've had the keyboard replaced (may have been just a loose connection, but I paid for this warranty, damn it

), a new LCD (backlight would go off when it shouldn't), new hard drive and a new external power supply.

I usually use the e-mail support. You will generally go back and forth a few times (sometimes I don't think the people reading the e-mails like to read the *whole* message).

Dell's desktop warranty service is not bad either. As long as you can easily show what the problem is (i.e. bad hard drive using their diagnostic tools), that it.

**eugenen** · 06-28-2004, 08:37 PM

Is it a latitude or Inspiron. The latitudes have much better warranties. The trick to calling them is to know what you are doing. Most of the time they will ask you to reboot, remove and reinstall drivers, flash firmware, etc. If you check all that first you can save a lot of time. My calls to tech support usually go like "system locks up randomly, I have reinstalled windows clean with the dell restore cd, removed the non dell ram and network card, downloaded all the latest drivers and firmware from your web site and installed them" (insert Compaq/HP/Whomever in the brand)) and they usually send me to the next level right away.