With laptops...

[Alex]

...How important is the warantee? People keep on saying 'go to dell, then knowck the warrantee down to 1 year', but if a laptop decides to go down after 2 years and you don't have the warrantee, how easy is it to get it fixed, at not too much cost? Is it worth spending the extra £200 on a warantee? I was looking specifically at the Dell Inspiron 6000 for a friend...

[nichomach]

With laptops, the most common failures I've found are the hard disk or *ahem* user-initiated malfunction ("I dropped it"..."I don't know HOW that happened..."(yeah, right, you lying little ****)...or on one memorable occasion, well, the tyre marks over the middle of the bag kind of gave the game away). The hard disk might be covered, as might an optical drive or a floppy, but accidental damage wouldn't be. We buy Latitudes at work, cause they're great corporate machines, and they have three years next day on site cover as standard, and the Latitude support bods have a clue (the Inspiron ones, I've found, do not); but we also buy accidental damage and theft cover. How easy are they to fix? Well, if it's a knackered hard disk, hell, just buy another one. Laptop HDs can be had from under £40 for a 20GB Travelstar. Optical drives are trickier, but you COULD use an external, and you can pick up a USB2 Lite-On Dual Layer for what, £51-52 and that's inc VAT, or you could use the Dell parts store and pick one up, or for discontinued models, I think they go via Service Source (01925 260830). Would I spend £200 for 3-year cover on an Inspiron 6000? Hell, they start at about £450, so no. I wouldn't.

[Alex]

Problem is, person who wants this laptop doesn't really have a clue about computers, so wouldn't have much of a clue about how to change a HD/optical drive etc. Can you send things back to dell to get them fixed at a cost? Any idea how much they charge normally, plus parts?

[Jonny M]

Right, first of all, I find the 1 year on desktops to be perfectly good, cause I'm not throwing it around all over the place.

However, on a laptop that's another story. It's not so much the 3 year warranty that I'm bothered about, it's the accidental damage cover. Laptops by their nature will get thrown around a lot, and I think you're asking for it if you don't buy a laptop without some form of accidental damage cover (the cover on my Acer cost £100 for a 3 year warranty inc. accidental damage insurange). However, it's all about that cover as a % of the system price. If it was a grand of laptop (or more), then I'd get the cover every time. If it was a £500 system then I'd take the standard warranty and leave it at that.

Edit: I don't like Acer. Or Inspirons.

[nichomach]

Yes, you can, but under those circumstances with a very non-technical user? Get the warranty. Stops 'em asking you to fix it every few weeks too...

[Matt1eD]

You can order through Dell, their own spare parts. I don't know about sending them back at a cost. It'll be like all Dell upgrades.... at a price.

My friend's Dell has been nothing but trouble the other day totally died, the PSU gave up and surged the whole machine (along with a strong smell of ozone)....

Called Dell (had had problems before);

- they said, keep the HD, try to recover data (he had no backup and had windows streamlined down to opening IE within a miniscule time... it was amazing)
- send the old laptop
- they'll send out the Inspiron 6000
- he also managed to get them to upgrade the warranty to 3 years, upgrade the CPU, graphics, optical and HD

the mobo was only a few months old anyway after that died before