Oolite Bulletins

Having gone on in another thread about my lovely work laptop (Dell XPS M1730), it has just spontaneously bricked itself, or more precisely the external PSU has died, it is no longer a 230W brick, and is now quite literally a brick, inert, cold, dead block of plastic.

Work bought four of these machines and this is the 3rd spontaneous dead PSU.

So, not impressed as the battery has gone flat (I didn't notice the blue LED on the psu had gone out) that there's no power left to stick in a USB drive and extract my WIP files (work related and personal) - and I won't be able to report it to Dell until work reopens on Tuesday and Dell has a 48hr turn-around for such things under our contract with them...

AAAARRRGGGHHHH!!!

(BTW, it's not the fuse, before anybody suggests it!)

Do you have another PC at home, perhaps an old Desktop model?

If so, you may be able to whip the hard drive out of the the dead laptop, and plug it into the Desktop as a slave drive, and get your files off of it.

Or perhaps pop round to PC World tomorrow (should be open) buy an external hard drive enclosure, plug the drive into it, and Bob is your mother's brother!

JazHaz wrote:

Do you have another PC at home, perhaps an old Desktop model?

If so, you may be able to whip the hard drive out of the the dead laptop, and plug it into the Desktop as a slave drive, and get your files off of it.

Or perhaps pop round to PC World tomorrow (should be open) buy an external hard drive enclosure, plug the drive into it, and Bob is your mother's brother!

Problem is - it's a £3000 laptop that's still under warranty from Dell - and the HD is not easy to get to - I've already looked - it's SATA too and my old Dell laptop is ATA - I also have a standard ATA to laptop ATA converter just for this purpose but of course no good to me at this point, even if I was prepared to take old HD out.

Thargoid wrote:

And Dell have done their usual trick of redesigning the battery between models/series and so you can't swap out the dead battery for a charged one from a different laptop and then pulling things off the drive under battery power?

I'm a little surprised though that it won't take power from another Dell brick - I've got 3 different types of Dell laptop all with different power bricks, but oddly the plug at the end of the wire which sticks into the laptop has never changed and I can actually swap around the bricks...

The PSU weighs 3kg and outputs 230W (the battery itself supplies 19.5V at 11.8A to the laptop) - I would have to strap all my other laptop PSUs together and I still don't think they could generate 230W (and yes, because of the load - specialist PSU connector on the laptop) - resigned now to the fact that I will have to wait until I get back to work on Tuesday to temporarily snaffle PSU from one of the other 1730s at work and then two days after that before a replacement turns up from Dell (43 days left on warranty...)

Thargoid wrote:

That's not a laptop, that's a small country...! Yipes, I didn't think they still made 'em that thirsty, even at the top end.

Best not to think of the battery as a battery but as a UPS - it lasts about 40min under full load without the PSU being plugged in.

From Dell Website based on Service tag:

XPS M1730 CORE 2 DUO T9500 2.60GHZ, 800, 6
17.0" ULTRASHARP WIDESCREEN WUXGA (1920X
SMOKE GRAY
EURO SHIP ACCESSORIES
RESOURCE DVD XPS M1730 - (DIAGNOSTICS &
ENGLISH DOCUMENTATION XPS 1730
ENGLAND/ENGLISH..., FRN, GER, SPN PLACEMAT XPS M1730
MEMORY : 6144MB (1X2048 + 1X4096) 667MHZ
HARD DRIVE: 320GB FREE FALL SENSOR (7200
OPTICAL DRIVE : INTERNAL BLU-RAY ROM COM
UK/IRISH 220V AC ADAPTER POWER CORD
AC ADAPTER 230W
PRIMARY 9-CELL 85WHR LI-ION BATTERY
GRAPHICS : DUAL SLI 512MB NVIDIA GEFORCE 9800M GT)
DELL TRAVEL REMOTE CONTROL
EUROPEAN - DELL TRUEMOBILE 355 INTERNAL
INTEL? NEXT-GEN WIRELESS-N MINI-PCI CARD

It looks like long-term (praise be for foresight of extended 3yr warranty) - flaky PSUs will be the least of my worries... (there are hundreds and in some threads thousands of posts like this...)

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthr ... 3&page=136

I mess about with a lot of laptops at work, and have noticed that plugging in a less powerful charger to a laptop that expects more power will cause that laptop to step down its power requirements and usually informs you when you start it up that it is doing so but to get a higher rated charger asap. I know a lot of Acer/Asus and Dell do this..

EDIT: Have you checked the fuse, (just teasing)...

polomint wrote:

I mess about with a lot of laptops at work, and have noticed that plugging in a less powerful charger to a laptop that expects more power will cause that laptop to step down its power requirements and usually informs you when you start it up that it is doing so but to get a higher rated charger asap. I know a lot of Acer/Asus and Dell do this..

EDIT: Have you checked the fuse, (just teasing)...

I know some have tried this, at boot, the battery performs a test and reports to the screen that it has insufficient power to continue booting - damn these clever batteries!

What ever happened to compatability? I chop and change stuff out of my old macs all the time. One is getting a bit stroppy as it becomes a teenager.

I rate computers as I rate animals. Lifetime wise anyway.

And it sounds like you have what is known in the trade as a Hamster laptop there me old son.

What you need is a dog laptop, dependable loyal and good for at least 10-15 years.

Wasn't it Dell who turned around a few years ago and said the only laptops they made that should be used for more than a couple of hours a day were their top-of-the-range Latitude business models, and that they refused to guarantee any of their other laptops as good for more than a few hours a day?

I seem to recall this was just after the place I worked had just shelled out for a load of Dells that kept dying just before reaching the end of the warranty period...

ClymAngus wrote:

What ever happened to compatability? I chop and change stuff out of my old macs all the time. One is getting a bit stroppy as it becomes a teenager.

I rate computers as I rate animals. Lifetime wise anyway.

And it sounds like you have what is known in the trade as a Hamster laptop there me old son.

What you need is a dog laptop, dependable loyal and good for at least 10-15 years.

I've got an old Pentium-133MHz HP 800CT, as faithful as any hound, 15 yrs old this year, has never let me down.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I also have a standard ATA to laptop ATA converter just for this purpose but of course no good to me at this point, even if I was prepared to take old HD out.

Various sites, (including ebuyer - they seem to deliver within 3 working days) are selling laptop sata to usb cables, they're less than a tenner. Theyre fairly useful. I myself got a combined sata/ata to usb connector which I think was £15 or so at the time. I'd definitely back up all my data before sending the computer for repairs. One of the techie guys at work (your workplace that is) might well have one of those connectors gathering dust in a drawer somewnere: it might be an idea to ask them if they can help out...

Something else I should say, just to really ruin your day - if your laptop goes off to Dell, make sure you find out what their terms & conditions are concerning how they go about trying to save the data on the HDD.

Luckily the company I used to work for were on a Government suppliers list so the HDDs had to be removed before we let Dell take kit away for "repair"... but you know it's bad when even their own site engineers tell you horror stories of disks that were supposed to be "safe" in the hands of the "home base" repair monkeys...

If the laptop is coming to the end of the warranty anyway, why not just write it off as a lesson learned and remove the HDD (before letting Dell have it back as a paperweight - sounds like that's all it's good for.)? At least that way you know they won't lose, misplace, corrupt, "accidentally" copy or do anything else unwanted (by you) with your data...