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pistonbroke

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Dell Inspiron 15R

Bought August 2011 brand new from PC world .

HID tried it last night and dead as a doormat , no lights or beeps , nothing , zilch , absolutely dormant .

Any ideas before I take it back and complain , shirley these things should last more than 15 months

P.S.

not the charger cos that works fine on my other dell .

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take battery out push and hold down power button for about 1 minute. refit battery and try again.

might work i have had this couple of times on laptops[ seems to work discharges a over charge] but not saying it will work for you :suspect:

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Dell Inspiron 15R

Bought August 2011 brand new from PC world .

HID tried it last night and dead as a doormat , no lights or beeps , nothing , zilch , absolutely dormant .

Any ideas before I take it back and complain , shirley these things should last more than 15 months

P.S.

not the charger cos that works fine on my other dell .

I do sympathise as this happened twice with two laptops we had!!!! Both expired within two months of the 12 month warranty ending - a theory I still have is that they are programmed to do so!!!!

However now we always buy electrical and hi end stuff from good ol John Lewis. Their long term warranties are gold plated and they are backed up with their no quibble refund or replacement.

A mate had an ordinary 1080p telly with a 5 year warranty and after 2.5 years it was fooked so they gave him a new one and a smart TV upgrade free!!!

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A year warranty does not matter, you are allowed to complain about defects during the reasonable lifetime of a product, so at least two years for a laptop and Trading Standards will back you all the way on this one.

Dell are actually very good if you contact them direct, been dealing with them since 1999 when I was at the time spending £300k per month with them on my previous job

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Have had it on a previous laptop where the charger port had come away from the pcb. I took the thing to bits and re soldered it but its not a job for the faint hearted.

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Sounds like power issue, blown psu or issue with something in that area. Happens all the time with laptops.

Other big issue is second you disconnect power, it dies as if no battery, when battery fitted.

First and cheapest option is to get a can of compressed air, unscrew back and any covers and just clear out any dust and crud that's built up in the fans and any ports. Re-assemble everything and see if the helps.

Much beyond that is a solder/part replacement.

I've had MAC for years now and not worked with pc's for about 5. Never had an issue with MAC, other tgan cost! Had my MACAIR for three years now, never slowed down and never an issue. Mrs C's had a PC and laptop fail in that time.

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take battery out push and hold down power button for about 1 minute. refit battery and try again.

might work i have had this couple of times on laptops[ seems to work discharges a over charge] but not saying it will work for you :suspect:

This just worked for me on a Dell. Top tip. My battery had gone 100% flat and wouldn't start on the mains until the battery was removed. Very odd.

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Your not using it hard enough! I can make a three month old MB Pro grind slower if I try hard enough! :d

We've had a few airs and pro's fail, but Apple has been very good at sorting them out. Mac Mini based devices that we've seen seem to have a slightly higher problem rate, and Apple haven't been quite as good at sorting those out.

That said, still better (lower) failure rates than even branded PC's let alone generic bitsa's

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Mac Mini based devices that we've seen seem to have a slightly higher problem rate

Do tell... We're about to fit a bunch to act as "iTunes Servers" to feed Apple TV installs so it would be handy to know what to watch for...

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Sorry for the delay - had to double check first, as I didn't deal directly with the systems!

Power supply issues were relatively minor, and I'm told easily resolved. The difficult one though has been related to the on-board Ethernet ports. It's a hardware issue; it manifests itself initially as poor/intermittent data connection eventually leading to total lack of being able to send and receive traffic over the port. Yet the network connection physically shows as up, receives ip config information via DHCP from the server when set up to do so and is visible to other devices on the network. Even Apple hasn't been able to resolve it. (The affected machines have been out with warranty and the clients haven't wished to swap motherboards etc).

The affected machines are now using their in-built wireless Ethernet connections as a work-round and in this form continue to work fine.

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Update on OP

for any interested parties

Took it ( the laptop ) back to PCW , as expected was a complete waste of time and effort , the best they were prepared to do was offer was the standard repair job £50 for an diagnosis plus parts . The "manager " ( I use the term loosely ) offered , as a gesture of good will , free anti virus software on completion :arse: I could hardly contain myself after that good news :arse: :A***: :arse:

Today I ring Dell's expired warranty service , after a few rings a recorded voice asks me to input the 11 letter express code number from the back of the laptop which I do .

Next my call is answered, almost immediatly, by a service advisor type with the name of Preevin (thinks "here we go with the same old crap " he asks the usual tecky stuff like "is it plugged into the wall etc. I humour him with all the right answers upon which he decides its a motherboard problem and off he goes to seek higher authority . After a short pause (2 mins or so spent listening to frank sinatra ( not too painful ) he offers to upgrade my warranty for to 3 years for a fee £150 all singing and dancing , I explain that its a bit too much , I just want the laptop up and running like what it should be . OK he says option 2 we can send someone out to replace the mb F.O.C . and do a one off repair .

Result :) :) :)

So the moral is , if you want a laptop , buy Dell " absolutely superb and painless after sales service "

Do not buy it from PC World :t-up:

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As someone else said, we also was purchasing high volumes from Dell. All was well with the very few problems (actually I don't think we had any).

However a real problem arose between order and delivery. A very large order "disappeared" and there was no procedure to get it back on track for a delivery date. Before order, fine, after delivery, fine but the bit in the middle was a huge black hole.

In the end we had to go elsewhere. If I remember correctly HP matched Dells pricing and we had a real person to deal with on all the orders.

ed to add that we had a three year on-sire warranty on the servers (but not on desk tops and printers). We advised customers to buy a new server every 3 years. As we made no profit on hardware (and still don''t) all customers except one took our advice. The one who didn't had the machine crash big style and had a 3 days without a system whilst we got him a new server. I'll give him credit that he didn't try and blame us.

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We use to have a reseller account with Dell, back in the days of dealing with Ireland, they were excellent to deal with at all stages, warranty support and repairs were a dream compared to some others in the industry. Then Ireland went and sales went to call centres out east. We closed our account not long after. Despite numerous complaints to managers about sharp practice at account manager level.

Basically what would happen is that we'd need to order a variety of very precisely spec'd machines, (servers mainly plus workstations) we would build the spec of machine we wanted on line, this then went to Dell as an order. Trouble is, our account manager(s) in India, or wherever it was at the time, would cancel the orders, then reinput everything themselves as if it was a phone order through them. (to obtain the commission we always assumed). But the b******ds never ever got it quite right.

We'd then get a partly wrong order that but that matched the final order perfectly, so always had to be sorted out at our expense.

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