Dell Fixed!

Our train ride to Amsterdam was long and had several stops. As our ride came close to the city I saw lots of skyscrapers with interesting architecture. And to my surprise I also a large building with the DELL logo on the top. I immediately saw this as an opportunity to get my laptop fixed. I had run into problems in Paris since even though I could get an XPS service tech to come out and swap my motherboard and video card, the language barrier and lack of time made it nearly impossible. I couldn't even get through the French menu's, I had to call the US to make sure that a foreign replacement policy on my laptop was even possible.

Google Maps was able to tell me that there was indeed a Dell office building in Amsterdam. During one of my free days in Amsterdam I took the metro over with my laptop in my backpack. I bought 2 tickets on the metro and used the first one to get to the stop. I noticed that no one really checked tickets and there was no validation for the ticket I used. Basically I just swiped the ticket when I walk into the station and it lights up green. All the gates are open so I was sure there was plenty of people that would just walk through without paying.

I was able to catch some people outside the building on smoking breaks and luckily most Dutch people speak perfect English. I found out that the center was the headquarters for Belgium and the Netherlands. The person that was able to help me was an sales and he was able to schedule a next day repair service for my laptop. So I left it overnight. On my way back I saw a station that was full of uniform officers and giving most people tickets.

I picked it up the laptop the very next day. My 1 year warranty covered all the repair costs and it turned out that it was a overheated video card which required a motherboard replacement since the card is soldered onto the motherboard. Now everything is back to normal. It'll take me a while to get everything back to up to date since I was without it for a while.

My Laptop Died

Hello friends. Sad news but my Dell XPS m1330 has died after in its first 7months of use. I am guessing that the graphics card has overheated since I get vertical lines during boot and during initial post, before bios even pops up. I still have a 1 year warranty so hopefully I can get this resolved in Europe. The problem is I dont have a permanent location and won't be speaking the native language. Wish me luck, but otherwise this site maybe be dead for a while too.

This is Wei signing off for now =(