One of my clients and I both have Dell XPS M1210 Laptops.

These were small 12″ performance laptops.

Now my client’s M1210 had his motherboard recently replaced after it developed a Video out problem. It took Dell two site visits to effect that repair and a number of post repair problems  occurred:-

Corrupt Intel Pro Wireless Profile, so he couldn’t connect to his wireless network.

iTunes would not re Activate, so he was locked out of purchased content.

We got passed those problems and his laptop settled down for a bit.

So my heart sank when I got a call last week to say his laptop was dead suddenly, the power light was on but nothing else.

We tried removing the battery, we tried removing and re-seating the memory but nothing would bring it back to life.

My client is a Managing Director so the clock is ticking, his laptop is dead, he is locked out of his recent data.

So I do the right thing. I don’t want to inflict another Dell repair on him (a minimum 24 hour delay) So I swap the hard disk from his M1210 and put it in mine. He gets my laptop with his hard disk.

A couple  minutes later we are back up and running. The only hurdles are some software product activation and  iTunes was playing up again but that was expected.

All in all my client was offline for about 2 hours and most of that was me doing prep and travelling to site.

Naturally I come out of this worse as his laptop was several months older and had less ram and no web cam  and was based on the initial release of Core2Duo. However this is a small price to pay to get my client up and running.

The Next Day Hangover

After spending 25 minutes talking to Dell Technical Support they agree to replace the motherboard again.

This time I hope they do a better Job. The picture below is the faulty one I got back from the client, the one that had its motherboard replaced about a month ago. You can clearly see masking tape covering a good 20% of the air vent.

I would imagine this could have easily caused the machine to overheat and fry.

For my sins I am back computing on a Dell Latitude D630 running Windows XP (again) until I decide what’s next.

***Update 11th June 2008***

Dell contacted me about this case.

There was a lot of debate about who said what when, and each engineer site visit was investigated in great detail.

They acknowledge that the masking tape should have not be left in place (pictured above).

Initially they said as I elected to replace the customers machine with my own one, that was a business decision I had made.

However they have subsequently offered to perform a number of upgrades to the M1210 to bring it back into line with the specification of the machine I gave my client.

This includes replacing the screen to include the inbuilt webcam, upgrade the memory to 2gb, replacing the CPU to get to Core 2 Duo 2 and extend the warranty by the 70 odd days.

So I thank Dell for investigating this case and offering the upgrades.