First, sometime in December, there was a settlement to a class action lawsuit
re. the Inspiron 5150. The settlement gave all Inspiron 5150's another year of
service under warranty. The primary reason for the lawsuit was overheating due
to poor ventilation out of the bottom of the case, but the extension to the
warranties does not distinguish.
A month or two before, I bought a dead Inspiron 5150 fully loaded for parts from
a company that had some computers to dispose of. Then I found out about the
class action lawsuit, so I got in touch with Dell Customer Service on-line and
requested that the computer be fixed. A DHL courier dropped off a box with a
pre-paid return label. Monday, I sent the 5150 back, with the DHL guy picking
up the carton on his rounds in the neighborhood. About mid-afternoon today,
the 5150 returned, in good working order. That's less than 48 hours, pretty
good service.
Apparently, Dell's contractor for warranty repairs, Solectron, is co-located
with DHL's Memphis hub. So the box makes a trip non-stop there and back.
Anyway, anyone who has an Inspiron 5150 needs to be aware of the extended
warranty, which can be checked at the Dell web site. Unfortunately (or is it
fortunately?), none of the other models with the identical chassis (1100, 1150,
5100, 5160) were addressed in the class action lawsuit. With the same chassis,
it is difficult to understand why these models would not have the same
overheating problems, although the 1100 and 1150 are typically powered by slower
and cooler Pentium and Celeron CPUs.
Having taken apart a few of these laptops, I can say that they are decently
constructed, so it's just the heat that is the Achilles heel... Ben Myers
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