Dell Ought to be Ashamed of Themselves...

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
Joined
Oct 29, 2000
Messages
38,830
So, I got a recent promotion on a Dell Inspiron 15 with a Skylake i3 at a price I couldn't refuse. It had only 4GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning harddrive, but I did some googling and it said they were upgradeable, so I thought, no problem, I can just get a second stick of RAM and stick one of my pile of SSD's in there, and it should be a decent little machine.

Are these people kidding?

My only experience with Dell laptops before this has been with Latitude D and E series laptops, and I was expecting the same, you know, a door in the bottom over the RAM slots and a slot on the side to pull out the drive. Was I ever mistaken.

A goddamned pile of tiny screws, removing the keyboard, and several flat cables later and I finally have the drive out.

There ought to be a law that all computers sold must have easily accessible doors to access RAM and hard drives. This is absolutely nuts. The only possible reason I can think of for designing this thing so badly is that they want to actively discourage self servicing, and just make people throw them out instead.

Shame on you Dell.

This is almost as bad as that one nightmare experience I had servicing an old discrete macbook pro...
 
Upgradeable*

*By Dell hahaha sucker welcome to hell.

That's how you sell a support package.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
So, I got a recent promotion on a Dell Inspiron 15 with a Skylake i3 at a price I couldn't refuse. It had only 4GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning harddrive, but I did some googling and it said they were upgradeable, so I thought, no problem, I can just get a second stick of RAM and stick one of my pile of SSD's in there, and it should be a decent little machine.

Are these people kidding?

My only experience with Dell laptops before this has been with Latitude D and E series laptops, and I was expecting the same, you know, a door in the bottom over the RAM slots and a slot on the side to pull out the drive. Was I ever mistaken.

A goddamned pile of tiny screws, removing the keyboard, and several flat cables later and I finally have the drive out.

There ought to be a law that all computers sold must have easily accessible doors to access RAM and hard drives. This is absolutely nuts. The only possible reason I can think of for designing this thing so badly is that they want to actively discourage self servicing, and just make people throw them out instead.

Shame on you Dell.

This is almost as bad as that one nightmare experience I had servicing an old discrete macbook pro...
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, this has been common practice for many laptop manufacturers for several years now. I once upgraded a CPU on a Compaq unit that wasn't designed to be upgraded. Sure, the motherboard had a CPU socket but you had to take the machine into virtually every piece it could go into in order to access it. Even installing RAM was a clusterfuck.
 
There is a reason that level of machine is so cheap. Access panels/ease of disassembly take engineering and cost more to produce. Add that to the fact that 98% of people will never care to mess with hardware in a dirt cheap laptop, and it's a calculated decision to do it cheap and easy.
 
At the same time, it's fun to watch a Dell tech take one apart and reassemble at lightning speed.
 
One reason why I only buy off lease, or otherwise refurb Latitudes. I spend the same, but get more power and if it needs fixed I can fix it.. I bought an Acer once where one of the Ram chips was under the keyboard. Never again, that thing was a pile from day one. Hacked drivers to make a Win XP only dvd drive run on Vista, and of course Vista borked the drivers every time. I ended up having to buy a copy of XP, find all the drivers everywhere except Acer ( they refused to supply them ).. bad part was in those days I hated Dell for no reason other than I hated them. But now all I own is stuff I built, or off lease Dell.
 
Keep in mind Z, they're also on the mad quest to shave every mm they can from devices. This is why we don't have user replaceable batteries on most phones anymore.
 
matt167 said:
One reason why I only buy off lease, or otherwise refurb Latitudes. I spend the same, but get more power and if it needs fixed I can fix it.. I bought an Acer once where one of the Ram chips was under the keyboard. Never again, that thing was a pile from day one. Hacked drivers to make a Win XP only dvd drive run on Vista, and of course Vista borked the drivers every time. I ended up having to buy a copy of XP, find all the drivers everywhere except Acer ( they refused to supply them ).. bad part was in those days I hated Dell for no reason other than I hated them. But now all I own is stuff I built, or off lease Dell.
Click to expand...


That's what I usually do as well.

This one is for the better half though. She does does not appreciate these things, and just wants something thin and sleek. She did not care for the stubby Latitude E6430s.

I saw the consumer Inspiron for a very low price and she liked it, so I figured I could get it for her, upgrade it a little (more ram + existing SSD) and I'll take the Latitude for the rare occasion when I want to use a laptop (like when I need to connect serially to a switch or router for configuration, or something stupid like that)

It was a much bigger pain in the ass than I expected though.
 
Dan_D said:
All the ones I've seen do it fast have parts left over when they are done.
Click to expand...
I guess I'm lucky. It's like they know exactly where to place each screw as they come out and they know where to go to get the right screw when it goes back together. Always amazes me anyhow.
 
Not really related that much, but your grief reminded me of friends who wanted me to fix/upgrade late 90's Packard Bell computers.

Ugh.
 
I've worked on a lot of laptops, some of them are like that.

I just replaced a keyboard on an ASUS laptop for a friend, that was a pain in the balls. Several very small/short ribbon
cables in addition to the larger keyboard ribbon cable. It's really easy to destroy those connectors if you aren't careful.

Most of them are easy, but this one was sandwiched between the top cover and a support cover under the keyboard.
It gave it a very solid feel and it was nicely engineered, but it sucked to work on. I had to squeeze my hand in there to
disconnect and reconnect the ribbon cables, they were short and made it really difficult.

All of the manufacturers have models that are more difficult to work on, nothing new really.

The Dell Inspiron 5577 gaming laptop I bought Black Friday is super easy to work on.
Swapped out the stock spinner for an SSD in 5 minutes.

BTW, I didn't know Michael Dell was Hispanic and had a son named Jesus who designed their laptops.
That must be it though, I know you wouldn't take the Lord's name in vain Z.

.
 
Dan_D said:
All the ones I've seen do it fast have parts left over when they are done.
Click to expand...

I have a bag of screws from a 17" Clevo motherboard replacement...

Yeah.


[the laptop yet lives, and participated in the holiday [H] compute challenge that we won :D ]
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
So, I got a recent promotion on a Dell Inspiron 15 with a Skylake i3 at a price I couldn't refuse. It had only 4GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning harddrive, but I did some googling and it said they were upgradeable, so I thought, no problem, I can just get a second stick of RAM and stick one of my pile of SSD's in there, and it should be a decent little machine.

Are these people kidding?

My only experience with Dell laptops before this has been with Latitude D and E series laptops, and I was expecting the same, you know, a door in the bottom over the RAM slots and a slot on the side to pull out the drive. Was I ever mistaken.

A goddamned pile of tiny screws, removing the keyboard, and several flat cables later and I finally have the drive out.

There ought to be a law that all computers sold must have easily accessible doors to access RAM and hard drives. This is absolutely nuts. The only possible reason I can think of for designing this thing so badly is that they want to actively discourage self servicing, and just make people throw them out instead.

Shame on you Dell.

This is almost as bad as that one nightmare experience I had servicing an old discrete macbook pro...
Click to expand...

Sorry you had a bad experience. I've had nothing but good experience with Dells. I got a Inspiron 1 in 2 from them late last year and have been really happy. A couple screws off the bottom and you can get to everything.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I have a bag of screws from a 17" Clevo motherboard replacement...

Yeah.


[the laptop yet lives, and participated in the holiday [H] compute challenge that we won :D ]
Click to expand...

When I worked at CompUSA during the 1990's repairing laptops, printers, etc. I rated technicians by how many screws they had left over after working on a laptop. A 1 or 2 screw technician was average and a 3 screw or more technician had no business working on the things. I was just about the only guy who never had screws left over when I was done.
 
Dan_D said:
When I worked at CompUSA during the 1990's repairing laptops, printers, etc. I rated technicians by how many screws they had left over after working on a laptop. A 1 or 2 screw technician was average and a 3 screw or more technician had no business working on the things. I was just about the only guy who never had screws left over when I was done.
Click to expand...

I did a year stint at the end of that decade- you weren't in Hurst were you?
 
Dan_D said:
When I worked at CompUSA during the 1990's repairing laptops, printers, etc. I rated technicians by how many screws they had left over after working on a laptop. A 1 or 2 screw technician was average and a 3 screw or more technician had no business working on the things. I was just about the only guy who never had screws left over when I was done.
Click to expand...

Yep.

Funny when these hacks would shrug and throw the extra screws in a plastic container full of a hundred more of them.
Then roll their eyes if I told them they should figure out where the screws go and fix it.

I'd often find myself going to that container for screws to replace missing ones on the laptops that came back in for service.
Sad when techs have no pride in their work and see no problem with mistreating customer owned equipment.

It makes me a little nuts when I find hard drives with no screws in them sitting loose inside of towers too.
That's usually the customer doing that though.


.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I did a year stint at the end of that decade- you weren't in Hurst were you?
Click to expand...

I worked in two locations. Northpark on Central Expressway in Dallas from early 1997 - summer 1999 and the Mesquite location a few years later as a part time job from 2003-2005. I also worked at Best Buy twice. 1996 to early 1997 and then again in summer 1999 through summer of 2000. I worked at their Northpark / Central Express store in it's original location and it's second location as well as the Irving store and the central service center off Luna road.

I was a hardware technician for several years and saw a lot of guys come and go. I saw few that took pride in their work. Most of the guys had reworks come back and I often ended up fixing their mistakes. I would round up the screws from the "screw bins" the other guys had and assemble the units properly. I had a reputation for excellence in my work which was unparalleled. It's why they knew me years later and when I looked for part time work, I had two locations fight over me. I was getting paid more per hour than some of the full time guys.

Comp USA was not an environment where your management ever backed you up so you were toothless when dealing with customers. Standing your ground on company policy got you no where. It was so common for management to cave in that just giving customers what they wanted without talking to a manager ended up being OK. However, one time a customer came in and attempted to pull a fast one on us and get a $30 memory install for free. However, he did it the wrong way. We had the most spineless operations manager in the world and laughed at a customer who accused me of not assembling his Toshiba laptop properly. The guy came in after attempting to do a memory upgrade sometime after I had done warranty work on his machine. He accused me of not assembling it with all the screws. He said he "ordered" a screw kit from Toshiba to fix my mistakes and wanted us to install the RAM for free. I was a certified Toshiba technician and Toshiba wasn't one to give customer's anything for any reason. He was just trying to scam us and our ops manager saw through it and the customer ended up paying for a memory install like anyone else.

I had gained a reputation for doing shit that others thought was impossible. I repaired broken AC power connectors on laptop motherboards, fixed printers that had toner cartridges explode in them, and upgraded many a machine that wasn't upgradeable. I took pride in my work at a time when most of the guys doing hardware work were swap monkeys who only knew how to install parts at a basic level. They weren't capable of much. Those guys are fucking savants compared to the guys that work in the hardware industry today.

When I worked for the State of Texas, we had guys from a contracted hardware vendor that would break your RAID 5 array and lose all the data each and every fucking time you needed a single drive swapped on any size array from 3 disks on up. I never figured out why this happened every single time. Hardware guys who can defeat the purpose of a RAID array through sheer stupidity and ineptitude are stunning to behold.
 
zamardii12 said:
Sorry you had a bad experience. I've had nothing but good experience with Dells. I got a Inspiron 1 in 2 from them late last year and have been really happy. A couple screws off the bottom and you can get to everything.
Click to expand...


Yeah, the new ones have taken a step backwards in this regard.

The procedure for accessing the bottom of the laptop to replace ram or the hard drive is as follows:

1.) Remove battery (easy)

2.) Remove optical drive (more difficult than it should be, but still easy)

3.) Flip over and open. Using a plastic spudger (to avoid damaging the plastic case) pry out the keyboard assembly on the top. (this took some technique, and constant fear that something would snap or break)

4.) Open latch and disconnect flat cable for keyboard

5.) Remove 5 screws located under the keyboard

6.) Open latch and disconnect ODD flat cable

7.) Close lid and flip over.

8.) remove 2 medium sized screws in battery compartment

9.) Remove 8 large screws from case

10.) remove 3 small screws from under ODD compartment

11.) Use a plastic spudger to very carefully separate the bottom cover from the rest of the computer. (this took some technique, and constant fear that something would snap or break)



Now you have access to the hard drive cage (comes off with 4 screws) and the ram (standard laptop ram clips)

I was originally going to install the SSD, and set up windows while waiting for the RAM i ordered and pop that in later, but it's enough of a pain in the butt that I only want to do it once, so I ma waiting for the new ram before I reassemble.

I also didn't have a plastic spudger, so I tried to carefully use a screwdriver and left some marks when removing the keyboard :( They aren't too bad though.


I was expecting the same experience I have had with Latitude machines for the last several years, not the same experience I had that one time 7 years ago when I made the mistake of trying to work on a macbook pro...
 
Dan_D said:
When I worked at CompUSA during the 1990's repairing laptops, printers, etc. I rated technicians by how many screws they had left over after working on a laptop. A 1 or 2 screw technician was average and a 3 screw or more technician had no business working on the things. I was just about the only guy who never had screws left over when I was done.
Click to expand...

IMHO, having left over parts (even screws) is inexcusable.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
IMHO, having left over parts (even screws) is inexcusable.
Click to expand...

They didn't normally leave out parts. But even the guys who could only work on desktops left out screws in those machines. The upgrade only guys were the worst. They'd do a hard drive and CD rom install and only use two screws most of the time.
 
Dan_D said:
They didn't normally leave out parts. But even the guys who could only work on desktops left out screws in those machines. The upgrade only guys were the worst. They'd do a hard drive and CD rom install and only use two screws most of the time.
Click to expand...


Were they being pushed and rushed to the point where they felt they didn't have a choice, or was it just plain old laziness?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
So, I got a recent promotion on a Dell Inspiron 15 with a Skylake i3 at a price I couldn't refuse. It had only 4GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning harddrive, but I did some googling and it said they were upgradeable, so I thought, no problem, I can just get a second stick of RAM and stick one of my pile of SSD's in there, and it should be a decent little machine.

Are these people kidding?

My only experience with Dell laptops before this has been with Latitude D and E series laptops, and I was expecting the same, you know, a door in the bottom over the RAM slots and a slot on the side to pull out the drive. Was I ever mistaken.

A goddamned pile of tiny screws, removing the keyboard, and several flat cables later and I finally have the drive out.

There ought to be a law that all computers sold must have easily accessible doors to access RAM and hard drives. This is absolutely nuts. The only possible reason I can think of for designing this thing so badly is that they want to actively discourage self servicing, and just make people throw them out instead.

Shame on you Dell.

This is almost as bad as that one nightmare experience I had servicing an old discrete macbook pro...
Click to expand...

Sorry cheap laptops from any manufacturer are not easily serviceable, however for a seasoned tech (like myself) it is not THAT HARD to disassemble it and upgrade it.
 
I got a top of the line ASUS gaming laptop recently. To upgrade it you still have to pop clips and take the whole bottom off. So welcome to 2015.
 
At least you could unscrew it. I bought an asus laptop that you had to open with a credit card slid between the edges to pop the plastic apart. I knew that going in before I bought it so I didn't really care, but that is how cheap laptops are.
 
I don't mind the screws either, but once you need to start prying things to get open is when the cursing starts.
 
cjcox said:
At the same time, it's fun to watch a Dell tech take one apart and reassemble at lightning speed.
Click to expand...

I did onsite Dell warranty repair for 2 years. Got to the point that I could replace a laptop motherboard in under 20 minutes.

Laptops are super easy to work on after doing a couple of each model.

And SFF desktops were even faster. During the capacitor apocalypse, I once replaced 10 motherboards in under 1 hour.
 
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