On Mon, 10 August 1998, Ben Brown wrote:
> > P.S. I returned my Inspiron for a complete refund after experiencing
> > hardware problems that Dell was unable to fix. I bought a Gateway
> > Solo 9100 SE instead. What a difference... The price for that is now
> > $2875 (the no DVD / no modem version). If you have that option, don't
> > hesitate...
>
> If you don't mind me asking what was the problem?
Well, it's a long story. When I bought my Inspiron I tried to test
the hdd, but everything seemed fine for the first 100 cylinders so I
thought "what the heck, it's a new machine, it ain't going to fail the
hdd test". I installed Linux on it and started to use it. I noticed
that sometimes the system would become unresponsive and recover only
after a few minutes, but I didn't pay much attention, mostly because
the system had 32Mb and the hdd indicator was blinking - I assumed it
was swapping.
At some point though I felt something was wrong and decided to try to
read the hdd:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=64k
I got a bunch of retries, DMA failures, etc. Then I ran Dell's
diagnostic floppy, and it took 14 hours to run the read test -
eventually failing around cyl 9xx near the end (where I had my swap
partition)_. I thought the hdd was bad, and I returned it to Dell.
They sent me another one. I put it in, same behaviour. I was getting
angry, when I suddenly realised that if I apply some pressure (not
much, just as if you would lift the laptop w/ one hand) around the hdd
location, everything starts working at the right speed. I returned
the laptopt to Dell, they diagnosed the problem as a motherboard
problem and replaced it. They sent the system back to me, but now,
even though the read test was ok, the write test was taking 5 hours
instead of 40min. The system was not correctly comming out of suspend
mode (not even in windows), etc. I gave up and returned it for a
complete refund.
Tudor
