Has anyone had a bad experience with Dell?
I always thought they were really awesome and wouldn't bye anything else untill now. We bought 2 laptops of the same kind (600m inspiron) about 1 year and 4 months ago. I loved my laptop and had no problems with it. Right around the time the warranty was to end the screen went bad...No big deal. A Dell rep was at my house the next day replacing the thing with no questions ask. But after my warranty died it seemed like everything just went bad. First of all, I had never really used my CD drive because I had one of those USB flash memories. To save time the cd drive didn't read correctly or had something wrong, so I emailed them and got NO reply back...That was 3 months ago.(gave up) Not to long ago my hard drive started working slower and slower, and finally it just stoped working completely. I contacted them immediately and they simply said they wouldn't do anything about it since the warranty ended.

I called them and told my story....Some dude said he would dispatch an email about contacting some warranty office, but he never did.
Anyways, I just think this is a bunch of crap. It's obvious there's something wrong with their design or something. I would think a laptop is able to last at least 2-3 years(my brothers gateway is still going after 4). I also would think they should fix their systems that they load with crappy hardware. I don't have any money. I'm still paying my parents for this one, and now I'm faced with getting a new(can't) and there's no way I'm buying a new harddrive for this piece of junk. I haven't even explained the problems I've had with overheating. The weird thing is the second laptop is working fine....Never hard a problem with it.

Just sounds like it might be defective, since your other system was fine. I've heard things about Dell laptops with mice that move themselves. If the CD drive is bad, it costs a few hundred to get a new one, better than replacing the entire laptop.

I've found Best Buy to have Toshiba's for around $650 US after rebates. Been using a Toshiba for over a year and love it.

I've been looking around and I'm definately not the only one having problems. I'm finding stuff all over the internet about Dell. We just called again today and some manager is suppose to call tommorow. If it's not still not resolved, there are a few lawyers accepting cases against Dell for free and I'll be happy to contact them.

Why contact a lawyer? Did you buy the extended warranty?

Not playing Devil's Advocate, but that's why they offer warranties. Your screen died, and their CD-ROM is busted. Those are 2 unrelated components-- how is that a defect, or a design flaw? If they'd have bought the warranty, I'm sure that a drive would have been shipped your way, no problem. Cheap hardware, sure, maybe, but that's how they get such low prices, I'll bet.

Lesson of the day: Buy the extended warranty on things like laptops. 75% of hardware failures occur in that 3-4 year period of ownership, or something like that-- that's why they offer them!

You sure the cd rom lens isnt dirty?

No comments about the hard drive

As Alex said, you get what you pay for.
Had they opted for extended warranty the things would have been repaired under warranty. They didn't, which was their own choice, so they have to foot the bill.

I know of only one company that ever deliberately designed a system to fail shortly after warranty expired (or so went the rumour at the time, as almost every machine of that model failed within a month of the warranty expiring, which was more than random chance would allow for), and they got seriously burned over it.

Personally I don't usually go for extended warranty myself, but on a laptop with its expensive to replace parts I would.
Most things either fail rapidly or don't fail until the economic life of the device is long over after all.

Extended warranty is expensive. All it's doing is paying for the problems ahead of time.

3-4 years? Mine's not even 1 and a half years old! If I could have got 3 years out of the crap I wouldn't mad. 1600 bucks for something that only lasts barely over a year is not right.

I work tech support for an electrical engineering company and over the last few years we have switched from Tosiba and Gateway to almost all Dell laptops for employees. I am very impressed with their service while the warranty is in place. (Barring a bizarre event where one guy went through 4 motherboards in 2 months, but they kept replacing them without giving me too much crap)

Honestly, I hope your wrong about the long term life of the machines, we buy 3 year support on all our machines, but I'd like to see them last a tad longer. I'll let you know how things are going in about 1 1/2 years.


P.S.- If your mouse takes off by itself (in response to earlier post), update your point stick and mouse drivers and if that doesnt work disable the point stick and see if that stops it (it usually does), if so take off the keyboard and fiddle with it, then give up and have a dell tech replace the keyboard AND the palm rest just to be safe.

Always found their tech support was excellent