back to article Dell claims Latitude E4300 glitches 'fixed'

Dell is on a collision course with some disgruntled customers after it insisted problems with a components shortage in the vendor's Latitude E4300 models had now been resolved. The computer maker added the issues with the laptop, which was hit by lengthy shipping delays of up to three months in January, had been fixed and that …

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  1. M7S
    Stop

    Something's wrong here

    "Senior Notebook Contracts Manager"?

    How many notebook contracts managers do they have? (talk about a job with lots of potential for freebies!)

    I guess that a place like a Uni might need a number of different types of lappy (go on, fire away) to accomodate the requirements/whims of different eggheads, but this seems at first glance absurd. Either that or they really need to change vendors to get something needing less management.

    However thanks for the article as I was about to consider one of the 6400 ATG's. I'll look more carefully at this now.

  2. Adam
    IT Angle

    What do you expect

    With all due respect. What do you expect with a manufacturer who buys components of whoever will sell them cheapst and be damned with the quality assurance and compatability.

    Its just a shame they apply the same principle to their servers (you try deploying standard images to 10 "identical" servers (according to dell) whiich were all procured at the same time then wondering why 6 of them wont boot due to having different mainboard manufacturers and different BIOS's!).

    Adam

  3. Inachu
    Flame

    Dell is on shaky ground.

    I suffered one time from their last BIOS Snafus.

    I bought the DELL 400 celeron and at the time it was sold it supported 500 megs of ram.

    Well being a techie I always wanted to make sure the pc was up to date.

    So I flashed the BIOS and now the pc only saw 256 megs of ram.

    I was so angry at this...... The other snafu they made was their Latitude 5100 used a desktop CPU and not a laptop CPU and it got so hot it bent my memory sticks created an eternal BSOD and they refused to fix it anymore.

    So I sold hte laptop for $50 to a kid while it cost me $1,400 new.

    Grrrr

    It seems Quality control is not being followed and I doubt they have any ISO 900XXXX compliant nor had they ever had any Six sigma training.

  4. Goat Jam
    Paris Hilton

    @Inachu

    Ummm, proper techies know that you don't go flashing your BIOS unless you are actually trying to fix something that is broken.

    Perhaps you can take something from that experience.

    Paris, cuz she'll take all the RAM she can get.

  5. sleepy

    build to order

    Dell's "build to order" business model often amounted to "buy the cheapest parts and adjust product specs to meet the incoming parts stream" plus "sell the price point then use the cheapest parts to complete the order". It's no surprise to see different internals from unit to unit with the same model number.

    Dell would say their volumes are so large that it's not possible to meet demand from a single source of supply. Precisely; greed trumps integrity?

    In the old days they made so much profit out of this that they could easily resolve problems that customers actually noticed. But not today.

  6. Norman Wanzer
    Boffin

    E-Series

    I work at a University in the US. We are a Dell shop because of agreements with Dell to buy at a lower cost. So far we have had interesting issues with the E Series laptops - almost all revolved around the touch pad. The few E-4300s we do have all showed erratic behavior when using the touch pad with the Dell driver (even the latest one). In 50% of them reverting to the MS generic mouse driver solved the problem. In the rest, the touch pad and the motherboard had to be replaced. We seem to also be having similar problems with the 6400s. The 6500 have been ok so far, but we do not have many of them at this time.

    The Dell techs that come to repair the things have all been complaining. Not about the failures but that the E Series is the hardest to take apart and service. Takes them hours to do a board replacement which on the older D series would have taken 20 minutes.

    I'm sure once the issues have all been solved the E series will be just as reliable as the old Ds, but until that point is reached it is going to be painful.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No complaints hee

    Seems whoever you're hardware supplier is, sometimes you'll have a bad run of luck. Our company has had precisely two hardware problems I'm aware of with Dell laptops in two years (that weren't user-generated - thanks for fixing my keyboard under warranty, Dell guy). That's in about five years of exclusively buying Dell.

    My D830, keyboard-knack aside, hasn't had a problem in the 18 months or so I've had it, and the Inspiron it replaced really took some abuse, what with having demonstration versions of Domino, Websphere Portal and WAS, and DB2, plus some desktop apps all running at the same time. In half a gig of memory.

    But then my registry's pretty clean, no SE Asian shopping mall software, and there's no games on it.

    I take the point that if there's dodgy components, there's dodgy components, but I really can't see that any major manufacturer is going to be more immune from that than another.

  8. Mike Lovell
    Flame

    @Inachu

    Not entirely sure you know what you're doing from reading your post!

    Also it was very nice of you to sell it to the kid rather than give it to him, even though it got hot enough to bend memory sticks and probably untold unseen damage rendering it worthless!

    Where were you using it, in a sauna???

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: E-series

    > The few E-4300s we do have all showed erratic behavior when using the touch pad

    I thought all touchpads were like that? I've never seen one yet that didn't make the pointer jump around as if it were possessed. Apple or Dell, makes no difference. They're all crap.

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