Dell problem revisited.

This is a continuous story. Other parts of the story are here.
Part1
Part2

Yesterday i recieved the replacement hard drive. It was shipped using the overnight shipment from Fedex. As i had requested Dell has sent me a screwdriver and 4 spare screws. They also sent another set of installer CD and DVDs. So far so good. When i looked at the hard drive, it was from Toshiba and there was a label saying it is "refurbished". I have never used a refurbished item yet so that made me little skeptical. It would have been real great if they had sent me a 1 page instruction manual for how to do it. Although to Dell's credit, their customer support guy called me at around 7:15 in the evening. But i was away and couldn't pickup his call. He was supposed to give me instructions on how to do the drive replacement. Anyways after dinner, i found some youtube videos of how to replace a dell hard drive. One of them is this. It is real easy. You just need to have a proper screwdriver, little patience and some common sense. So i took out the faulty hard drive. It was from Seagate. I will do some research to find out which hard drive is more reliable Toshiba or Seagate. More on that later. After the new hard drive was properly screwed, on start it did some installation. The whole installation process was automatic. It went on for about 20 minutes. In the end it asked me to configure the OS, saying what language, timezone, what should be the name of computer etc. After that i configured it to connect to my home wireless. Finally back in business. We will monitor its behavior for couple of days before saying that everything is all right. I have spent around 3-4 hours on this hard drive issue. Hopefully this will be the last of problems.

Dell Problem continued...

This is in continuation with my story from here.

Now i have started noticing that whenever PC boots up Windows XP says that one of the disk may have some problem and it is trying to check disk. Then it reported that 2 of the segments had error. I looked it up on Internet and found that it is most likely because of hard drive failure. So now i had no other option left, but to prepare myself with a phone call to Dell. The first thing i did was to burn the data on a DVD, just in case if it fails completely. Today i had a call with Dell tech support. When i explained my problem to the person, he thought it best to refer to senior level support. After a wait time of about 10 minutes finally i got hold of the senior level person. I must admit he was a very genuine and helpful guy. He asked me to run hardware diagnosis program. He explained me what is happening in each step. It took about 15-20 minutes after the memory scan was complete, it came to an error screen saying that 2000-XXX error has happened while testing hard disk. Well that was expected. So i am going to get a replacement of hard disk. It is good thing that i got 1 year warranty on this machine. I will keep updated on it in my next post.

My new dell laptop - bad and miserable.

Couple of months ago, i bought a new dell laptop. It is Inspiron 1500 series. I had bought last laptop from dell too. That was in 2004. It was also an Inspiron machine. I have been very happy with its performance. Even now it is serving all my purpose of checking emails. I do some programming on it too. For this laptop i never had to talk to dell technical support guys once. I was so happy with its performance that i recommended it to my younger brother and my brother in law in India.
Now coming back to my new laptop. With totally satisfied from my past experience, i bought this one with cool features. It has integrated bluetooth, in built webcam, 500 GB hard disk, 4 GB RAM, dual core machine. I have bought 1 year at home service warranty too. To make my wife happy i even paid little extra money to get it in red color. Boy lookwise it looks great. But that is where i stop praising it. Looks like Dell is going very easy on the performance testing of its machine.

In the past 3 months i had to call dell tech support many times. First time microphone stopped working. Second time somehow the place where we insert power supply became loose. If anyone had tried to convince the support guys that it is not your fault that it is not working, i totally feel their pain. And everytime they try to sell me the extended warranty. As if they have built the faulty machine for purpose, just to squeeze my money.
Now the machine freezes very frequently and both me and my wife are trying to regain our energy to talk to the tech support.
I am not going to recommend any one again about dell anymore.