Dell NBD Service

I bought my Dell Latitude C840 notebook a little over three years ago and I was smart enough to get next business day service for it for a four year period. While I haven’t used the service all that much, I’ve used it enough that I feel it was worth the extra cost. Today I had my fans replaced for the third time. Normally I would think that this is perhaps a quality issue but when you consider that my fans are running almost all the time, I don’t feel that the quality is poor. They are little fans and they probably run 2500 hours or more a year. In any case, I called Dell on Friday and on Monday morning I had a contract tech from Dell replacing my fans. And when my BIOS clock was failing, they had a new motherboard for me the next day too. Compare that with warranty service where you take the laptop back to the point of purchase or worse, mail back to depot service. When you rely on your notebook to do your job, suddenly the extra $300 for three more years of coverage doesn’t seem so bad does it?

When at work, I have my notebook docked and because of a poor design, the docking station somewhat blocks the flow of hot air pushed out the laptop from the fans. As such, my notebook tends to run a bit hotter when docked. As such, the at least one of the fans are running throughout the day. Interestingly enough, the Dell BIOS doesn’t have the fans come on until the temperature reaches the mid sixties, which to me, seems awfully high. But luckily enough there is a nice set of utilities for Linux that allow me to monitor the temperature and fan speeds and thus keep the temperature much lower. I used to do that manually until I discovered an even cooler plugin for Gkrellm called i8krellm that monitors the temperatures and automatically turns on the fans as appropriate when certain temperature levels are reached. That ultimately means that my fans last longer since they only come on when needed and more importantly it means a longer overall life for my notebook.

And for the past year I’ve been considering a new Dell notebook. But I at this point I can’t see it happening. My C840 is a 2 GHz Pentium 4 M. But after the C840 was discontinued and they moved onto the D-series, they dropped the CPU speeds down to 1.x GHz on Latitude notebooks and it’s only recently that they brought out the D840 which finally has a CPU speed that rivals my three year old notebook. I guess most business customers (Latitude is mostly geared for business) don’t need high speed for compiling (and playing Enemy Territory) like I do.

2 comments »

1. By Anonymous 2 days later:

   
   
   Keep in mind that Intel's Pentium M processors give much better performance per cycle than the Pentium 4; MHz isn't everything.

2. By Douglas 2 days later:

   
   
   Interesting point. My Latitude has a Pentium 4-M but I never noticed that on the new Latitudes the '4' has been dropped and they now simply have just Pentium M processors in them. Stupid brain. Of course, to be perfectly honest I don't actually know the difference between the two. I'll have to ask Mike.