Dell Nvidia GPU Issues

Recently, as a birthday present, my parents split the price of a new laptop with me. I wanted something sleek with a good screen, and, very importantly, a smaller than 15.4″ screen size.

I settled on the Dell XPS M1330. It was the obvious choice, as it ticked all the boxes, and had a decent 128MB graphics chip for when I play the odd game.

The laptop had a discount of about €200 at the time, and I also availed of a company discount from the company I worked for during the summer, I specced out a top of the range model,

Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5GHz, 4GB RAM, WLED Screen, 320GB HDD, the works basically.

It came to €1166, a good saving on the €1400 it would have cost without my discounts.

I got the laptop and was delighted, it looks fantastic and doesn’t sacrifice style over substance. Then I spotted something on Engadget that worried me.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/10/all-nvidia-8400m-8600m-chips-faulty/

That includes the chip in my laptop.. The upshot is that my laptop could fail at any second due to this problem, and Dell and Nvidia know about it.

But thats ok, because I’m still under warrenty, phew..if it breaks I can just send it back and they’ll fix it…

By replacing the faulty graphics chip with another, ALSO FAULTY chip!!

Am I the only one who sees this as contravening my consumer rights? As I remember from my secondary school Business Studies class (and well I should, I got an A!) under the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act of 1980 goods must be, as described, fit for their purpose and of merchantable quality.

How can a chip that Dell have admitted is faulty (see here and here) be considered fit for purpose and of merchantable quality?? A shop keeper cannot legally sell you a cup, if it is, in fact, broken.

Dells answer to this first of all was to issue a BIOS update, which I personally haven’t availed of, because all it does is run the fan more often, slightly prolonging the time to failure, not fixing the underlying problem. Now they are offering a 1 year warranty upgrade, which is some comfort, but really all it means is that they’ll keep replacing faulty chips with more faulty chips for an extra year.

Can anyone say flustercuck?!

What is the solution? Simple, a full recall is not needed, and the warranty upgrade is a step in the right direction, I have no problem using my laptop with the faulty chip as long as it doesn’t fail, but I don’t want to send it back if it does and get a new faulty chip in return. I would be satisfied if Dell said they would replace all returned laptops with either a non faulty Nvidia chip, or alternatively, an ATi chip.

Surely the expense of replacing the chips with another different model would be less than having to replace the faulty chip over and over again? Some people commenting on the Direct 2 Dell blog have had to send their Laptop back 3 times!

Come on Dell! Get the finger out! Give us a real solution to the problem, less stalling and stop gap measures!

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