Dell XPS M1530 Nightmare

I've had many dells over the years, and never had any problems with Dell's service. I would never get a machine without the complete care warranty, then they'd come out and fix it for you on-site, without you having to do all that running around...

Many Dell's here also. No problems at all with service. I have had minor hardware issues in the past. All were solved.

All Dell's service parts are labeled refurbished regardless of weather or not they actually are refurbished. Typically in Laptops its only the LCD Screen and motherboards and other Circuit Boards that ever get refurbished. Even keyboards are marked refurbished, and I highly doubt Dell pays someone to clean up cruddy keyboards and replace busted keycaps all day. Hard Drives typically are from tray lots directly from their respective manufacturer (be it Fujitsu or Hitachi or Western Digital). The reasons service parts are marked as refurbished is to seperate them out from the parts that are for NEW systems.

As for having to drive 8 hours to get the laptop (and bring it back), whoever made you do that ought to be ASHAMED of themselves. I have a fairly large state university in my service territory and it's no problem for a college student to get Dell to put the service address at their school. I service laptops at West Texas A&M all the time for students in their dorm room, or at the student union, or in the library.

As for the problems with the Hard Drive. Is your son putting the laptop in his bag WITHOUT powering it down first? When a hard drive is operating it is most susceptible to damage from even a casual bump in a crowded area. Not only that, if left on then crammed inside the insulating padding of a laptop carrier the hard drive might be getting too hot, far beyond it's normal operating range.

I'm sorry to here about your problems, but it does appear to be unusual. My experience with Dell's service has been nothing but outstanding on my old I9300, which is my first Dell. (Actually this is the first brand-name computer I've purchased as all previous machines I've owned have been home-built.) When I purchased, I did so with the "at-home" extended service warranty which I would recommend to anyone interested in a laptop, because they just take so much of a beating compared to desk-tops.

In the nearly 3 years I've owned my mine I've had to use the service twice, once to replace a bad keyboard, the other to replace a bad wifi card. Both times my experience was great, all I had to do was go to Dell's service chat and explain my problem(s) and within 2 days a tech came to my home and repaired it. As a matter of fact I've been so pleased that I recommended Dell to my Mom and both my brothers who have all made purchases from Dell over the last two years.

That said, I think you have 2 possible scenarios as to what's killing your harddrives. The first thing I would look into is what a previous poster mentioned, your son may be putting the machine away and transporting it in either "hibernate" or "stand by" mode thinking it's turned off. As was stated doing this leaves the drive susceptible to damage.

The other option is that perhaps you've got an intermittently bad drive-controller which is integrated onto the motherboard. I've seen this happen on a couple of machines I've worked on over the years. I had an Abit board years ago that sporadiccally killed drives, and had a hell of a time diagnosing because whenever I would trouble shoot after a drive failure everything would check out fine. It turned out that my powersupply wasn't up to the task and when I was heavily taxing the system it would spike, eventually leading to a complete failure of the controller. And I had a FIC board that over time the power regulating capacitors went bad and caused the controller to crap out, unfortunately taking out two drives in the process.

Now in both of these instances they were IDE/PATA drives not modern SATA drives. However, I believe SATA drives are just a susceptible to damage from a bad controller. So this is something I would look into.

I guess there could be a third scenario, perhaps your son is just too rough with his lappy. Remember that although a laptop may be portable, very few are rugged, and those that are built ruggedly are very expensive and lack many of the features better conventional laptops include at a much lower price.

I hope this helps.

Ciao

This is not too good to hear. It may have been mentioned but how long did you have this dell computer before this happened to you. I have many dell computers and after 3 + years on one of my oldest dells, I had a harddrive click of death; all others work still as they did on the first day.

Had great service recently, came to work and fixed in 20 minutes.

whenever I've had Dell stuff fixed, the technician was dispatched to where the computer was located, not to where it was purchased.

2nd, if you do not have next business day service, what do you expect?