Like any other Dell product I have ever owned (god knows why I continue to puchase from them) this laptop has broken several times since it's purchase in January 2009.
Mine came with 2.5ghz duo core, 4gb of ram, 300gb hdd, 17" screen, 5 USB ports, wireless card, Geforce 8800M graphics card. When it's running, it's sexy as hell. Fantastic specs for a laptop. When it's running, it runs very smoothly- I often even try to overload the system with a whole bunch of browers open, world of warcraft, skype, msn and music streaming and the only thing that suffers is my browsing speed!
However, the problems have been painful. My main problem was with the customer service I received from them, both from the Glasgow office and their Indian call centres.
I was suffering from a blue screen of death, that was a 'Memory Parity Error'. It took them five call outs, 6 new sticks of ram, 3 video cards and 3 motherboards until they ended up fixing the problem. What was the problem, I asked the final maintenance man who was working on behalf of Dell. "The RAM that comes with this computer that Dell uses is crap. I just replaced yours with Samsung RAM, which they finally agreed to".
Good stuff. The customer services departments were absolutely useless. They made me re-install Windows twice (for no reason) saying it was a software error and were in general rude and unhelpful. As per usual in my experience.
So... if you want to save some money on a well specced laptop, go Dell. But be warned - when you call technical support/ customer services in 3 months time, be prepared for a long windy road of hell. Google it yourself, "Dell customer service" - it hasn't even improved since the infamous "My Dell Hell" blog in 2005. Lol.
Oh. It also looks really weird. It's SUPER HEAVY and is fat. The battery pack is the size of both of my feet combined and weighs about half of the laptop. It has these unnecessary lighhts or "wings" on the back that light up too. It's fun for 5 minutes until you realise electricity money is draining out the back of your screen that you can't even see.
It's basically a portable desktop. You're not going to move this unless you *absolutely have to*. It's a beast. It doesn't fit into any of my 17" laptop bags and is about 10cm tall.
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Aug 16th, 2009
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