The 5150 went to electronics recycling last year. Good riddance.
I picked up another freebie Dell laptop computer. Ugh. A bit older and slower. After a fresh install of XP SP2, the problems begin almost immediately. The windows updater won't install, gets stuck in a loop and tries about every 30 seconds which eats up lots of hard drive space. Can't update ie without that. Nor windows itself. The video is pathetically slow. Can't watch live streaming video. Tried out Chrome for a browser. Ugh, not compatible with so many sites. The wife has to use a later version of IE to access work stuff. Time to wipe it an try again.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Monday, October 3, 2011
Dell Hell
Kryton says electronic devices go to Silicon Heaven, a term from the British tv sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, when they expire. But as victims of bike thievery like to hope, there is a special place in hell for thieves . Dell computers may well have their own special place in silicon hell.
The Inspiron 5150. Considered "Dell's worst ever laptop" by some on the internet. Perhaps favored by a few lawyers due to the successful class action lawsuit against Dell. All 5150s were ordered replaced free of charge to anyone merely in possession of one. With a catch, the settlement period ended 4/21/2007. Too late for me.
My uninspired 5150 came from the Tulchin household in NYC. Laid up with a failed hard drive. I did surgery. New hard drive, bigger ram, wi-fi card added. That only made sen$e because the price was right. Thank you Mr T. I made the next mistake of turning it over to IT for installation of Windows 7 and the latest M$ Office. Just a reminder that computers are always happiest with the os they were shipped with. Trying to upgrade is a guarantee for trouble. I needed to take video lessons on the then current version of Access for part of my employment. Seemed like an okay computer for that with out having to mess with my "good" computers.
Turns out our IT deptpartment subscribes to the latest in Microsoft's get richer key code schema. Instead of each copy of Windows getting it's own key code permanently installed, there is a central server on campus that each computer must connect with every few months to stay activated. Once that time expires with out contact, so does windows. At least they gave me the lesson on how to solve that issue the first time so I could fix it 6 months later on. Again. Of course you must use your University ID to do that. Once you no longer work there, bye bye working computer. Don't let the door hit you on the way out? Oh yeah, try getting wacked 6 months later. Genuine Windows Advantage is what microsoft calls it. Advantage,Burns Gates. It forces the legitimate user to help Microsoft police it's own faulty technology with more faulty technology. WGA spends a bit of your computer time checking to see if all your microsoft software is legit, even the stuff they give away for free.
Ah, the touch pad. Once you install windows 7 on a Dell designed for XP you open up another can of worms. A constant problem that drove me nuts, oh excuse me, The Undocumented Feature of the touch tablet / mouse driver that does not support disabling Tap on the touch pad when you use an external mouse. Personally I find the touch pads very slow and awkward compared to a mouse. I normally shut them off. If I can. Okay even mice are slow compared to knowing what keys to use for commands. Except the 5150 has the navigation keys laid out in a bizarre manner. Anyhow, the microsoft OWA, Outlook Web Access software that the U uses for web access to our email positions the send button exactly on the same screen real estate as where you click to reply to mail. You click to reply, start typing your response and even the slightest brush of the pad with your thumb sends your email, usually incomplete and un-spell checked. Grrr. XP drivers are not Win 7 compatible on the Dell laptops. I tried one that admitted it had known compatibly issues such as killing Internet Explorer, a key component of windows. Dell never saw the need to issue a decent driver for windows 7 software for older Dells. Just buy a new computer already. Keep the chinese economy out of trouble.
Also described as the "computer designed to break". The 5150 has many faults. Overheating is a big one. Most dell computers have suffered from overheating issues for many years. Excess heat cooking hard drives and baking capacitors. The thermostatically controlled cooling fans running full tilt, making more noise and sucking in more dust which adheres to electrostatically charged components, acting like insulation, causing more heat.
What killed my 5150 was the extra tabs on the access doors on the underside of the computer. 2 doors. One for the wi-fi card, one for memory. Door C and door M. Communications & Memory I'd guess. The M door has these 2 useless tabs that actually press on the underside of the main circuit board, directly on the LVC14A chip. After numerous flexings of the computer, opening and closing the lid or simply picking the computer up, that tab breaks the solder joints on the power regulating chip. Power no longer gets from the ac power adaptor to the computer and once the battery is run down, that's it. The affected chip is about 1/4 inch long with 14 leads in 2 rows. That means each lead is about 1/16" of an inch wide separated by the thickness of a razor blade. It takes 20x power magnification just to see the leads, let alone seeing which of the 14 solder joints is cracked. Fat chance trying to re-solder when even the smallest soldering gun tips are many times larger. Even brain surgeons would pass on this.
The 5150 sits in a pile now with other expired electronic devices, striped of the still usable drive and memory, waiting for the bus. Bus to where? Who knows. Recycling or silicon hell.
The Inspiron 5150. Considered "Dell's worst ever laptop" by some on the internet. Perhaps favored by a few lawyers due to the successful class action lawsuit against Dell. All 5150s were ordered replaced free of charge to anyone merely in possession of one. With a catch, the settlement period ended 4/21/2007. Too late for me.
My uninspired 5150 came from the Tulchin household in NYC. Laid up with a failed hard drive. I did surgery. New hard drive, bigger ram, wi-fi card added. That only made sen$e because the price was right. Thank you Mr T. I made the next mistake of turning it over to IT for installation of Windows 7 and the latest M$ Office. Just a reminder that computers are always happiest with the os they were shipped with. Trying to upgrade is a guarantee for trouble. I needed to take video lessons on the then current version of Access for part of my employment. Seemed like an okay computer for that with out having to mess with my "good" computers.
Turns out our IT deptpartment subscribes to the latest in Microsoft's get richer key code schema. Instead of each copy of Windows getting it's own key code permanently installed, there is a central server on campus that each computer must connect with every few months to stay activated. Once that time expires with out contact, so does windows. At least they gave me the lesson on how to solve that issue the first time so I could fix it 6 months later on. Again. Of course you must use your University ID to do that. Once you no longer work there, bye bye working computer. Don't let the door hit you on the way out? Oh yeah, try getting wacked 6 months later. Genuine Windows Advantage is what microsoft calls it. Advantage,
Ah, the touch pad. Once you install windows 7 on a Dell designed for XP you open up another can of worms. A constant problem that drove me nuts, oh excuse me, The Undocumented Feature of the touch tablet / mouse driver that does not support disabling Tap on the touch pad when you use an external mouse. Personally I find the touch pads very slow and awkward compared to a mouse. I normally shut them off. If I can. Okay even mice are slow compared to knowing what keys to use for commands. Except the 5150 has the navigation keys laid out in a bizarre manner. Anyhow, the microsoft OWA, Outlook Web Access software that the U uses for web access to our email positions the send button exactly on the same screen real estate as where you click to reply to mail. You click to reply, start typing your response and even the slightest brush of the pad with your thumb sends your email, usually incomplete and un-spell checked. Grrr. XP drivers are not Win 7 compatible on the Dell laptops. I tried one that admitted it had known compatibly issues such as killing Internet Explorer, a key component of windows. Dell never saw the need to issue a decent driver for windows 7 software for older Dells. Just buy a new computer already. Keep the chinese economy out of trouble.
Also described as the "computer designed to break". The 5150 has many faults. Overheating is a big one. Most dell computers have suffered from overheating issues for many years. Excess heat cooking hard drives and baking capacitors. The thermostatically controlled cooling fans running full tilt, making more noise and sucking in more dust which adheres to electrostatically charged components, acting like insulation, causing more heat.
What killed my 5150 was the extra tabs on the access doors on the underside of the computer. 2 doors. One for the wi-fi card, one for memory. Door C and door M. Communications & Memory I'd guess. The M door has these 2 useless tabs that actually press on the underside of the main circuit board, directly on the LVC14A chip. After numerous flexings of the computer, opening and closing the lid or simply picking the computer up, that tab breaks the solder joints on the power regulating chip. Power no longer gets from the ac power adaptor to the computer and once the battery is run down, that's it. The affected chip is about 1/4 inch long with 14 leads in 2 rows. That means each lead is about 1/16" of an inch wide separated by the thickness of a razor blade. It takes 20x power magnification just to see the leads, let alone seeing which of the 14 solder joints is cracked. Fat chance trying to re-solder when even the smallest soldering gun tips are many times larger. Even brain surgeons would pass on this.
The 5150 sits in a pile now with other expired electronic devices, striped of the still usable drive and memory, waiting for the bus. Bus to where? Who knows. Recycling or silicon hell.
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