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One of my childhood computers was a Dell 486. My first laptop was a Dell Pentium II. I’ve had many other Dells since, but they did me dirty on the XPS 15 9560 I
by cainxinth 3y ago
One of my childhood computers was a Dell 486. My first laptop was a Dell Pentium II. I’ve had many other Dells since, but they did me dirty on the XPS 15 9560 I bought in 2018.
It’s was a beautiful machine, but within months of purchasing it, it started overheating and shutting down under heavy load. I’m fairly certain it was a thermal management design flaw for that particular year and model, and that Dell knew it and was determined to not replace any of them.
Instead, they spent probably several multiples of what the device cost sending techs to my house to replace the mobo (which had the CPU and GPU soldered on) no less than half a dozen times. They also made me mail it back to them for a few weeks. This went on for literally three years until the warranty was up and they washed their hands of me.
Ultimately, nothing fixed the issue. I had to permanently underclock it to prevent overheating. So, I had three years of issues, a company that wouldn’t replace their defective product and instead put me through the wringer, and I was left with a computer was incapable of operating at the specs advertised when I bought it.
I don’t know if I’ll ever buy another Dell, but they ate up most of the good will I had for them with that debacle.
- appleflaxen 3y agoI had a similar experience when they sold me a PC with upgradable RAM. When the time came to upgrade, it made the PC slower (like ... much slower) due to some idiosyncrasy about how they designed it. They refused to fix the problem, and I never bought a Dell again.
- duffyjp 3y agoI have the XPS 15 9530 from 2014. Somewhat depressingly it's the most powerful intel laptop I own so I still use it when I need to be mobile with Windows. I had to disable turbo boost to keep it from going nuclear under even trivial load. Mine doesn't overheat exactly, but the squirrel fans go full blast and it's super loud. I think the XPS line is just too thin for the hardware they shove in there. Mine has a quad core i7 which was pretty rare for 2014 but if you can't realistically make use of it...
- cainxinth 3y agoI think a lot of the XPS laptops are sold to executives that want an expensive machine for the optics but won’t do much more than basic office work with it. Those ones probably never call to complain about thermal management. Meanwhile, I was trying to render video on mine and it was hitting 100C and blue screening constantly.