Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Bloody Laptop

My laptop finally gave up the ghost over the weekend. I own a 2 year old Dell 5150 and while it was a pretty good laptop with good battery life and good performance, there was an inherent weakness in it, the power socket is connected to the motherboard and tends to break. (The IT manager in work described it more sweepingly as "Its a Dell").

For the last few months the power cable was a little sensitive and would disconnect as I moved the laptop. Over the weekend it got worse and I had to wedge the cable at a weird angle to make a connection. Finally, last night, even that stopped working. After a quick search on the web I found lots of other people have the same or similar problems and Dell charge $400 to fix it, which is probably more than the laptop is now worth.

I now have two batteries which usually give me 3 hours of life each. With that six hours I have to backup my laptop and get it repaired, out of warranty, or get a new one. Bloody Dell.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Borrow a 2.5" USB enclosure, then you can get access to all the stuff on your the disk.

Dell's are never touted as being a super reliable machine, but sounds like a bad design choice on their part.

Declan said...

Yeah I should be able to find one. I'll look into getting it fixed and if its too expensive I'll just put the money towards a new laptop and strip the old ones hard drive and memory. Shame, I had hoped to get another year or two out of the 5150.