i had just finished my world history project about a half hour ago when i saved it on my usb flash drive and went over to my sister's Dell Inspiron 5100 to print it off. I hit the power button to wake it from sleep mode and i hear all these clicking and scratching noises, and im thinking, oh crap! i knew that something was up with the harddrive, especially when the screen stayed blank
so i restarted only to find an OS not found message

thanks a lot Dell you sold my family a POS laptop which now fails to boot up 1year and 4 months later becuase of harddrive failure

i remember just a few months ago we actually reccomended one of these POS laptops to a friend of ours when we thought they were ok

we'll have to see how good Dell support actually is tommorrow, but in the meantime i'll have to convince my history teacher to give me an extension becuase the computer with the printer on it no longer works and we cannot find the driver disc for it to put it on another computer

and i know there have been a lot of threads about how much Dells suck lately but this is on Dell laptops which are considered by many people to be the best laptops
i dont care which oem company it is, a harddrive should never fail after not even more than a year and a half
it's just too bad you cant build your own laptop

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

You got internet, why aren't you downloading a driver for your printer or driving off to kinko's or someone similar. Save a copy of your work on floppy and submit it as proof that you did the work. You can also email the work to school or fax it. Unusual that you don't have another printer around.

Your car battery dies one morning, does that mean you would make your own car and battery. That's the odds of MTBF. Somewhere, sometime there is going to be a failure.

First off, Dell does not manufacture the hard drive so you can hardly blame them for it dying.

Hard drives die, that just a fact of life and nothing you can do to stop it. Sometimes they will last years, sometimes they are DOA. Dells are fine computers, it's up to the user to backup their data to a safe storage device.

Why don't you go down to the local library and plug in your flash device to their computers and print out your report.

Sounds to me like you are (were) in the habit of leaving the laptop on full time, rather than shutting it down.

Laptops were NEVER designed for 24/7 operation. I'll admit that less than two years may be a "little slim" for the life of a hard drive, but here's what "we" don't know

How hot (or cold) it gets where the laptop is located.

How much hair/dirt/dust got sucked into the laptop, negatively affecting the cooling system.

How long this thing was left on, while being bumped, moved, used, abused, dropped, slammed, slid, pushed, punched, tilted, opened, closed, (are you getting the picture?)

So in conclusion, you have taken ONE laptop, out of the millions of Dell laptops that are being used, just one, and concluded that

"Dell laptops suck" is that what we are to understand?

Well, let me just clarify a point or two. First, NO MANUFACTURER, NONE, NADA, can make and sell a product and "guarantee" that it will not fail.

The only thing they can do, is if a product THAT HAS NOT BEEN MISUSED does fail, is replace the thing, or give you a refund.

I don't care if you are talking about the Space Shuttle, 911 radio/telephone systems, or the little air pump in your fish tank, thinks do fail. That does not mean that "they suck."

(Actually, fish tank pumps "blow.")

Lol, Well you're a little pissed, to say the least.

But Dell don't make laptops. They assemble them. Intel/AMD etc make cpu. IBM, MAXTOR, SEAGATE etc, make the hard drive. SONY et al make the optical drives, and SAMSUNG, etc make the ram. The only part Dell makes, is the case, and even that is likely a third party.

One thing Dell does make... MONEY.

Unlucky man, sorry to hear about all your hard work gone bad.

Oh, your work didn't go bad(he says reading the last bit of your posting)! At least you haven't lost your work!

okay to rely to all of you
we have 2 printers, one is pretty new(usb) and prints color very well(on the laptop) the other is another POS. the good printer had a driver disc but we lost it and at 26.4k i wasnt about to wait for a driver download and other possible problems at 1:30 in the morning
it was about 1:30 at night when i finished this project so the library was closed and noone would take me to kinkos and i dont have my license yet so i cant drive
and the library was of course closed,

but all that is beside the point
this laptop was taken care of, i mean handled gently and never dropped, we regularly scandisked it, and backed up files, when we used it we kept it on a table or with a house fan blowing on it, except for the occasional time when we didnt

and of course i know that Dell doesnt make there own parts

when you see a laptop you think of it as one single part, so when one thing breaks especially a harddrive there's nothing you can do except call the company

does anyone understand what im trying to say? we paid a premium for this laptop and we expected it to work perfectly for at least 3-4 years. Now, my sister hasno laptop with just a week before she has to drive back to college. We'll see about Dell's award winning support

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

Lol, Dude. DUDE! I would buy a new hard drive. And stick it in there, use the restore cd's, and you're good to go again. You do have restore cds right? Replacing the hard drive is VERY VERY EASY, incidentally. And hey! You have stellar support from computing.net! Someone here'll get you through it!

:-)

for a second i thought you were gonna say you have stellar support from Dell! lmao!

and incidentally i actually happen to have a six gig laptop harddrive lying around from the old mitac minote 6133 which i fried by turning it on with the cpu in wrong-
stop laughing at me!

after that experience i certainly learned about cpus and laptop parts

i could install the harddrive myself(we have the restore cds)but it's not my laptop, it's my sister's, and she for some reason wont let me open up her computer, i dont know why ;)

plus i think if i opened up the thing, Dell, would no longer let us extend our warranty

that's what they told us today on the phone- that's what the award winning 24/7 Dell tech support told us. TECH SUPPORT MY @$$! DELL TECH SUPPOR IS BS!!!
we call them up and guess what they're busy, for twenty minutes, so we wait and someone finally answers and we get transferred
then we wait and we have to supply some model numbers or some crap just to talk to someone
so finally we talk to some guy who says that since we are no longer under warranty we dont get tech support and it's about 4:00 so we will have to wait til monday to call! MONDAY! what happened to 24/7 tech support! so we can either pay$$$ to extent our warranty so that we can send in the laptop for repair or we can do nothing about it at all

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

If you need a to retrieve files from your harddrive, I read (I forgot where) that if you place your HD in the freezer for a few minutes you gain enough life back to at least recover what you have could've lost.

After that, buy a new HD and forget about DELL.

the harddrive is dead! it will not spin up! all that freezing trick is supposed to do is realign the platters
nothing i can do will get back the data on it, but that doesnt really matter since everything vital was backed up

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

If the warranty is over, there's not really anything Dell can do, unless you want to pay for tech support and pay them to replace the hard drive. Seems easier, faster, and cheaper to do it yourself...

Of course if it's not your computer, your choices are limited. Tell your sister she needs a new hard drive, the rest is up to her.

Luckily, nowadays nearly all computers have USB slots, so you can print out your work almost anywhere.

Best Luck,
Bob

i will have to say this, agreed completely that a hard drive can die at any time, just like anything else that is hardware, but as far as dell goes, i will agree that they have turned into a peice of s--- company compared to how they USED to be, i have seen multiple, multiple dells out of the box, not turn on, having windows broke, dead motherboards, deal power supplys, ect. ect. and the tech support themselves sucks, i have emailed them multiple time with complaints, they make their products propietary so that no matter what happens, it almost has to go back to dell, i have had a dell in here that had a bad power supply, 260w, i wanted to replace it with my instock 350W power supply's which we chare 31 dollars for, but because of the little "clip" they put by the power supply to "hold" it in place, i had to order it from there for my customer, and it cost over 100 dollars, they told me i would have next day shipping, i didn't receive it for 2 weeks (even tho they told me it was in stock) they failed to tell me that it was next day when it left their warehouse...i had another customer with a warrenty dell, bad motherboard, they sent me (dell) another motherboard, i put it in place, it was dead, i returned it back to them, they sent a replacement, this one booted up, but gave no video, i sent it back again, they say the third time is a charm, guess not, because the third "new" motherboard they sent me also failed, it took them 4 times and a month before my customer got their machine back...i mean come on that is pathetic, and it is all because they have cheap motherboards, use cheap memory, ect...5 years ago i would have been saying the exact opposite thing, but i beleive that they have turned towards making money, and making money alone, who cares now-a-days if a machine lasts two years and breaks, because hey in two years you can get a better dell right? yet i see 6 year old dells running like the day they were first purchased, i had one customer tell me that they 5 year old dell seemed to run faster than their new on (ok i know customers aren't always correct) but i mean come on...their computers are no longer top of the line, their marketing and lieing is

Complete Computer Service, Inc.
NW Indiana

Well... it kinda sucks that because one component crashes in a system, it is all of a sudden, everything made by this company is a POS... LOL!!! I don't work for any PC company, but I can tell you this... if there exists, a company that can make the "perfect" pc where everything works and NEVER breaks, hell will freeze over! LOL!!!
I'm sure at the time, because "giggles" had an important deadline, emotions got the better of you. I know Dell has had a good product out there and support has been good, but I will have to agree that quality is deteriorating. Oh well... I'm sure they are trying to cut costs like everyone else and picking up cheap components, to "save" money. Well.. by doing that, it hurts, cuz now they won't make money!
Hmmm if you were driving you most favorite car in the whole wide world to your wedding and you are already running late then all of a sudden you get a flat, I'm sure, with emotions very high, that car will be a POS!!! LOL!!!!

to begin with this computer was not my favorite! i knew all along, i remember telling my sister that it was a great computer and it had all the features that you would need but it was a dell

i have always said that dells suck and this is just the icing on the cake

sure a hdd can die at any time but dont you think that a hdd you buy in a dell computer should last longer than 4months after the warranty period!

i am still fuming about this as you can see
and i know that i will never hesitate to bash dell when ever someone asks me about which computer company they should buy from

today we ordered a replacement hdd from seagate, which btw carries a standard 5 year warranty, and it was about $40 cheaper than the replacement model dell was selling not to mention the fact that it spins at 5400rpm and holds 40gigs as opposed to the dell model POS(hitachi travelstar) which spins at 4200rpm holds 30gigs and will fail after 16months

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other