Faulty Dell models - which models?

Any know which Dell models this article below refers to ?



----- quote -------

Author --- Michael Lasky at WindowsSecrets.com



Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip


An old urban myth claims that the microprocessors used in PCs and
other consumer electronics are designed to fail within days or weeks
of their warranty expiration.

For tens of thousands of people who bought Dell and HP notebooks whose
motherboards fried often a few weeks after their warranty expired
there's nothing mythical about it.

The cause of the machines' fried motherboards is an overheating Nvidia
graphics chip. The failure rate is so huge that Nvidia had to take a
$196 million charge against earnings in the second quarter of its 2008
fiscal year in anticipation of the reimbursements that would result
from the faulty GPU (more info).

What's particularly scandalous, though, is how HP and Dell first
handled the deluge of complaints from customers with notebooks that
failed after their warranties expired. The companies either charged
the customers (victims?) for repairs or refused service because the
systems were past the warranty period.

Even worse, HP and Dell continued to sell notebooks with the same
Nvidia chip long after the companies were aware of the problem.
(Ultimately, Nvidia released a new version of the GPU that didn't
cause overheating.)

Unwary consumers who purchased the affected notebooks no doubt based
in part on the heady reputations of the vendors were left in the lurch
when their PCs failed, which usually occurred after 18 months or so.
The purchasers had no recourse except to yell and scream at clueless
tech-support reps.

When the heat from consumer complaints became as hot as the faulty
Nvidia chip, HP and Dell relented and published a list of defective
model numbers on their Web sites. Dell extended the standard one-year
warranty to two years for the systems they identified as having the
problem. HP offered a 24-month warranty extension for the specific
issue.

However, instead of issuing a recall as you would expect in such a
clear case of a defective part the vendors instead merely offered a
BIOS upgrade. The "patch" for the affected notebooks made their fans
run continuously in an attempt to lower the GPU-induced heat, which
was cooking the motherboards onto which the chips were soldered.

This "fix" merely extended the time before the motherboards finally
burned out while simultaneously devouring the machines' battery life
sort of like putting a Band-Aid on a coronary. Of course, notebook
purchasers became further inflamed by the power drain on their systems
due to the constantly running fan.

(Unlike Dell and HP, Apple quickly acknowledged the presence of the
defective Nvidia chip in some MacBook Pro notebooks and offered
repairs or replacements to its customers.)

How to get vendors to respond to your gripes

There ought to be a PC lemon law, like the lemon laws enacted in many
states that protect purchasers of defective automobiles. Those laws
came about because legions of consumers complained after they got
stuck with cars new and used that were clunkers. Until such
protections are available, you can take the following steps to get
redress for your grievances:

* Post a description of your gripe on consumer-complaint blogs.
People who bought the defective HP and Dell notebooks would have been
out of luck if it hadn't been for the rising power of Internet
communities and blogs ironically, some of which were on the vendor's
very own sites. These grass-roots efforts demonstrate that consumers
are not powerless when they own a lemon PC, even in the absence of a
lemon law to back them up.

As the number of postings about the problem on gripe sites rose,
HP and Dell could no longer hide from their customers. For example,
the site HP Lies was created specifically for consumers to fight back
against what the site calls "HP's cover-up of the Nvidia defect." A
massive number of people who had bought now-dead HP notebooks that
fried due to the overheated Nvidia chip not only spewed their venom at
the company but also offered legal and logistical advice to others who
shared their misfortune.

Surprisingly, many burned customers discovered the HP Lies site
through links on HP's own Business Support Forum. Likewise, news of
Dell's offer of a limited warranty enhancement with a list of affected
units was reported at Dell's Direct2Dell user-community blog as a
response to the thermonuclear anger expressed by unhappy customers at
the site.

* Take it to court. Many customers went the legal route and filed
lawsuits that were consolidated into a class-action complaint against
Nvidia, Dell, and HP last September. While less effective in getting a
full reimbursement or replacement, lawsuits serve as a wake-up call to
corporations and produce corresponding action to mollify the
plaintiffs.

* Skip low-level tech support and go directly to the top. If you
have a PC problem that's been proven to result from a defect, ask to
speak to a high-level tech-support representative, who will be more
empowered to address your complaint and likely more knowledgeable
about the issue as well.

Be persistent, but keep your cool (which may be more than your
PC is doing). Advice at the HP Lies site suggests going the corporate
route and obtaining a case manager to get free repairs or a
replacement, which standard tech support might not provide.

* Buy an extended-service warranty. HP and Dell customers who had
extended warranties got no-charge repairs and/or replacements for
their Nvidia-murdered systems. Because cheaper components are used in
most of today's low-cost computers, chances are those components will
fail sooner than in the past. Extended warranties generally offer no-
or low-hassle tech support and repairs for up to three years beyond
the standard warranty.

PCs may be unreliable and vendors unresponsive to customer complaints,
so it pays to know your options.

---- unquote ------

RnR wrote:
* Buy an extended-service warranty. HP and Dell customers who had
extended warranties got no-charge repairs and/or replacements for
their Nvidia-murdered systems. Because cheaper components are used in
most of today's low-cost computers, chances are those components will
fail sooner than in the past. Extended warranties generally offer no-
or low-hassle tech support and repairs for up to three years beyond
the standard warranty.

The extended warranty costs more than the machine. Moore's law kicks in.
--


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.

Hi!

What this article misses (in my opinion) is how many of these things
die in part to poor engineering or not following the specifications.
Sometimes you really do need that heatsink or to move the part away
from other hot parts.

In some cases, however, the products used really are defective. And in
this case, the defective product is the nVidia 8600 GPU. Dell and
other vendors did try to reign in the issue by putting out BIOS
updates to adjust the operating parameters of the affected chips and
the behavior of any relevant cooling fans. There was some claim that
later versions of the chip were fixed or at least better.

In cases where these failed just out of the warranty, I did hear of
successful negotiation by owners of affected products to get the
faulty chip replaced.

I think it's just another reason to go with integrated chipset video
and leave the video cards that need enough power to run a small
country alone. I'm not a gamer, though.

William (remembers when a graphics card lasted as long as the rest of
the computer!)

RnR wrote:
Any know which Dell models this article below refers to ?



----- quote -------

Author --- Michael Lasky at WindowsSecrets.com



Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip


An old urban myth claims that the microprocessors used in PCs and
other consumer electronics are designed to fail within days or weeks
of their warranty expiration.

For tens of thousands of people who bought Dell and HP notebooks whose
motherboards fried often a few weeks after their warranty expired
there's nothing mythical about it.

The cause of the machines' fried motherboards is an overheating Nvidia
graphics chip. The failure rate is so huge that Nvidia had to take a
$196 million charge against earnings in the second quarter of its 2008
fiscal year in anticipation of the reimbursements that would result
from the faulty GPU (more info).

What's particularly scandalous, though, is how HP and Dell first
handled the deluge of complaints from customers with notebooks that
failed after their warranties expired. The companies either charged
the customers (victims?) for repairs or refused service because the
systems were past the warranty period.

Even worse, HP and Dell continued to sell notebooks with the same
Nvidia chip long after the companies were aware of the problem.
(Ultimately, Nvidia released a new version of the GPU that didn't
cause overheating.)

Unwary consumers who purchased the affected notebooks no doubt based
in part on the heady reputations of the vendors were left in the lurch
when their PCs failed, which usually occurred after 18 months or so.
The purchasers had no recourse except to yell and scream at clueless
tech-support reps.

When the heat from consumer complaints became as hot as the faulty
Nvidia chip, HP and Dell relented and published a list of defective
model numbers on their Web sites. Dell extended the standard one-year
warranty to two years for the systems they identified as having the
problem. HP offered a 24-month warranty extension for the specific
issue.

However, instead of issuing a recall as you would expect in such a
clear case of a defective part the vendors instead merely offered a
BIOS upgrade. The "patch" for the affected notebooks made their fans
run continuously in an attempt to lower the GPU-induced heat, which
was cooking the motherboards onto which the chips were soldered.

This "fix" merely extended the time before the motherboards finally
burned out while simultaneously devouring the machines' battery life
sort of like putting a Band-Aid on a coronary. Of course, notebook
purchasers became further inflamed by the power drain on their systems
due to the constantly running fan.

(Unlike Dell and HP, Apple quickly acknowledged the presence of the
defective Nvidia chip in some MacBook Pro notebooks and offered
repairs or replacements to its customers.)

How to get vendors to respond to your gripes

There ought to be a PC lemon law, like the lemon laws enacted in many
states that protect purchasers of defective automobiles. Those laws
came about because legions of consumers complained after they got
stuck with cars new and used that were clunkers. Until such
protections are available, you can take the following steps to get
redress for your grievances:

* Post a description of your gripe on consumer-complaint blogs.
People who bought the defective HP and Dell notebooks would have been
out of luck if it hadn't been for the rising power of Internet
communities and blogs ironically, some of which were on the vendor's
very own sites. These grass-roots efforts demonstrate that consumers
are not powerless when they own a lemon PC, even in the absence of a
lemon law to back them up.

As the number of postings about the problem on gripe sites rose,
HP and Dell could no longer hide from their customers. For example,
the site HP Lies was created specifically for consumers to fight back
against what the site calls "HP's cover-up of the Nvidia defect." A
massive number of people who had bought now-dead HP notebooks that
fried due to the overheated Nvidia chip not only spewed their venom at
the company but also offered legal and logistical advice to others who
shared their misfortune.

Surprisingly, many burned customers discovered the HP Lies site
through links on HP's own Business Support Forum. Likewise, news of
Dell's offer of a limited warranty enhancement with a list of affected
units was reported at Dell's Direct2Dell user-community blog as a
response to the thermonuclear anger expressed by unhappy customers at
the site.

* Take it to court. Many customers went the legal route and filed
lawsuits that were consolidated into a class-action complaint against
Nvidia, Dell, and HP last September. While less effective in getting a
full reimbursement or replacement, lawsuits serve as a wake-up call to
corporations and produce corresponding action to mollify the
plaintiffs.

* Skip low-level tech support and go directly to the top. If you
have a PC problem that's been proven to result from a defect, ask to
speak to a high-level tech-support representative, who will be more
empowered to address your complaint and likely more knowledgeable
about the issue as well.

Be persistent, but keep your cool (which may be more than your
PC is doing). Advice at the HP Lies site suggests going the corporate
route and obtaining a case manager to get free repairs or a
replacement, which standard tech support might not provide.

* Buy an extended-service warranty. HP and Dell customers who had
extended warranties got no-charge repairs and/or replacements for
their Nvidia-murdered systems. Because cheaper components are used in
most of today's low-cost computers, chances are those components will
fail sooner than in the past. Extended warranties generally offer no-
or low-hassle tech support and repairs for up to three years beyond
the standard warranty.

PCs may be unreliable and vendors unresponsive to customer complaints,
so it pays to know your options.

---- unquote ------

Let me go back to the days of the Inspiron 5100, 5150 and 5160, and even
some black chassis Latitudes with nVidia cards. I have replaced a
number of failed nVidia cards on these models, because the graphics card
snaps onto the motherboard. And I won't even begin to enumerate the
failed nVidia AGP cards in desktops. I would advise any owner of a Dell
laptop to check the specs on their system, and request replacement for
any system apparently in the list on the Direct2Dell blog.

It would have been better had Michael Lasky enumerated the exact models
of Dells (and HPaqs) exhibiting nVidia failures. For HP, the list would
have been nearly infinite, as HP creates a separate model identifier
every time Mark Hurd, HP CEO, farts... Ben Myers

William R. Walsh wrote:
Hi!

What this article misses (in my opinion) is how many of these things
die in part to poor engineering or not following the specifications.
Sometimes you really do need that heatsink or to move the part away
from other hot parts.

In some cases, however, the products used really are defective. And in
this case, the defective product is the nVidia 8600 GPU. Dell and
other vendors did try to reign in the issue by putting out BIOS
updates to adjust the operating parameters of the affected chips and
the behavior of any relevant cooling fans. There was some claim that
later versions of the chip were fixed or at least better.

In cases where these failed just out of the warranty, I did hear of
successful negotiation by owners of affected products to get the
faulty chip replaced.

I think it's just another reason to go with integrated chipset video
and leave the video cards that need enough power to run a small
country alone. I'm not a gamer, though.

William (remembers when a graphics card lasted as long as the rest of
the computer!)

There are a lot of causes of graphic subsystem failure.

The WORST example of poor engineering design I have seen lately is in an
Acer Travelmate 290 with INTEGRATED Intel graphics, 845, IIRC. The CPU
had its own cooling fan, but the main motherboard chip did not even have
a heat sink on it. The system croaked after 5 years.

Laptops, in particular, suffer from poor care after being used in dusty,
dirty environments, especially around cats and dogs. I disassembled an
Inspiron 8500 recently and removed a slug of matted dog hair from the
fan vents. No surprise that the system is back in with a failing hard
drive whose SMART parameters indicate a maximum temperature ever of 149
Fahrenheit.

Still, the use of an nVidia chip on any board (graphics card or
motherboard) dooms the board to eventual failure unless the owner takes
almost obsessive steps to keep the system running cool. And now nVidia
is competing with MOTHERBOARD chipsets and integrated graphicss? HELP!
We will enter the world of disposable computers with a life of a year
or so.

To keep a laptop running for a long time, I recommend regular inspection
and cleaning (if necessary) of all the fans and vents. Also for Dells,
i8kfangui does a decent job of cooling a system without really wearing
out system fans. I have kept a number of Insprion 5100/5150 systems
running for clients over the years with cleaning and i8kfangui. Some of
these systems have nVidia cards... Ben Myers

Hi!

(a lot of previously quoted text from the OP was snipped!)

I have replaced a number of failed nVidia cards on these
models, because the graphics card snaps onto the
motherboard.

I'm not surprised to hear this. The GeForce Go5200 in my LatD800
frequently runs *hotter* than the main system CPU...and that means
even when the CPU is doing something like distributed.net. (You'd
better believe that I keep the system fans and radiators clean, along
with allowing it to breathe on a flat hard surface.)

I haven't ever lost it, but Dell did replace the card a few times
under warranty, although I never noticed it not working.

*And I won't even begin to enumerate the failed nVidia AGP
cards in desktops.

Me either. It would be a long list. My Dim8300 had a relatively tame
128MB nVidia card in it that started to weird out one day. It got
worse and worse until I finally couldn't use the computer. Oddly
enough, the basic video modes quit before the more advanced/high
performance ones. Pulled it out and found blown out caps along with a
very hot passive heatsink. It lasted maybe three years. Unbelievable.

For a replacement, I went with ATI's Radeon X1300. I wasn't crazy
about this decision--I have a Radeon 9800 in a Power Mac G4 whose
actively cooled heatsink stays so hot to the touch you can't stand to
touch it for any length of time. It cooked the fan and card once, ATI
replaced it under warranty. The replacement card is surviving but
still runs seriously hot.

If I'd have had a PCI slot going spare, I would have gone back in time
to find a Matrox Mystique PCI and said the heck with it. I did look at
Parhelia boards at the time, but didn't end up getting one.

*For HP, the list would have been nearly infinite, as HP creates
a separate model identifier every time Mark Hurd, HP CEO,
farts... Ben Myers

That would be funny if it weren't true. I wouldn't recommend anyone
buy an HP computer anyway. Even the business class desktops have
become so cheap. It's been sad to watch the quality engineering of the
HPaq Deskpro/Evo (starting with the EN Pentium 3 and moving up to the
2003 era P4s) slowly fade away to be replaced by cheap and shoddy
engineering. The HP home computers only went down the toilet that much
faster.

William