Damn, that didn't quite go according to plan

Today I took my broken Dell XPS M1710 laptop to UK Laptops on the other side of Oxford to get it fixed. I drove there in the wintery conditions but I had no problems. Unfortunately though, I was one of the 5% whose laptop they can't fix. I suspect because it's not a dry joints problem, it's actually a memory chip which is on the way out.

So that was a waste of a day and a tank of fuel.

So I'm going to try and underclock the graphics card, see if that makes any difference. Perhaps there are some diagnostic tools for nVidia graphics cards that check memory and even allow the driver to mark some as 'bad'.. fingers crossed!

If not, I'll reuse my fast 320GB HDD from that laptop, and perhaps the 2x1GB sticks will be wanted by kissycat1000 and ev1ldonut for their Advent 4211s?

Somewhat flabbergasted..

So I decide to call up Dell, to see if I can purchase a graphics card from them. Turns out that even though it's out of warranty, because I haven't called them before they'll offer to either have the laptop picked up tomorrow by courier for repair, which will take 10 days or so, or send an engineer out tomorrow with a replacement motherboard and graphics card.. but that would require me to buy an extended warranty, minimum cost £110 for 1 year.

I did enquire into upgrades, but there's a 2-3 month waiting list for the upgraded part - nVidia 8200GTX instead of 7900GTX, and it would cost £325, so I decided against that.

I've opted to have it picked up at no cost tomorrow for repair back at the factory.

So I'm slightly flabbergasted, in a good way. I think it's because it's an XPS model - a top of the range one that they made a lot of fuss about being reliable and having good support etc. There was even a premium support line number to call on Dell's site.

So now I feel a little stupid for my wasted trip to Oxford today, but happy that it's going to get fixed :)