Reader Jake says he just opened his 45 day old laptop and the LCD cracked for no reason. Now Dell doesn’t believe his story and won’t cover it under his warranty. That sucks.
Jake writes:
I need some help; Some help dealing with Dell.
I purchased a DEll XPS 1530 (red) edition at the end of January. Being the geek that I am, and have had a laptop last up to 4 years (an iBook G4) without problems, so why get insurance?
On (roughly) day 45, as I finished a paper, I closed the laptop. I unplugged it from the charger, set the laptop on the table, unplugged the charger form the wall, grabbed my M1530 off the table and walked upstairs.
I opened the laptop up after I plugged in the charger to the wall and laptop and sat down in my room. There was a huge crack in the LCD screen that starts the the bottom of the screen, which was next to the hinge of the laptop.
$1300, 45 days and there is a huge crack in the screen, that honestly, shouldn’t have happened. If they didn’t make such cheap products, that wouldn’t have happened.
I called Dell since the laptop was under the one year manufacturer semi-warranty. Sure enough, they want money to replace the LCD screen that broke.
Considering that I have seen laptops that have been dropped, kicked, traveled with, taken apart, stepped on and beat to hell and still run perfectly. A less than two minute walk up the stairs and me setting it up so I can use the laptop in bed causes a crack in the LCD screen and Dell is being too cheap to realize that I have a defective laptop.
What should I do?!
Well, first you could try escalating your complaint with Dell. You can try writing to their customer advocate debbie@dell.com. If that doesn’t work and Dell still denies warranty coverage, you can try your credit card company. (We’re assuming that you bought the laptop with some sort of credit or debit card.)
Since the laptop is so new you might be able to take advantage of any damage guarantees that your credit card offers. For example, an Amex gold card has up to $1,000 of purchase protection that includes accidental damage (not that this applies to you, or anything, but you’ll be sure they won’t hassle you.) Some cards will double the manufacturer’s warranty, others offer a return guarantee that will fully compensate you if you decide to “return” the item within a certain period of time and the retailer won’t accept it. If you can’t work it out with Dell, you should call your credit card company and talk to them about what they can do to help you.
It’s important to understand what protections your credit (or debit) cards offers so you can take advantage of them.
Good luck!
(Photo:Ben Popken)
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You fail.
As a consumer there is an obligation to unpackage and examine your product within a reasonable ammount of time so that you can verify that it’s in working order. That’s what retail return policies are all about.
Lets examine.
Lets say Best Buy (Yes, deliberate choice) drops your laptop, still inside its box, from 6′ above the floor, then just shrugs its shoulders and tucks it onto the shelf with the other ones, but its completely mangled in the box. Your options when you purchase it are as follows.
1 > Open it the moment you get home, go “Oh No!” and head right back to the store, you may have to speak with a manager, and you may have to push (Because its Worst Buy, after all) but you have a good reason and good explanation as to why you need another laptop.
2 > Leave it laying around your house for a month and a half, open it up, and go “Oh No!” and take it back to the store. At this point you’re outside of their return window, with a piece of hardware that’s most obviously broken, and -they- now have a good reason -not- to give you a new one. That reason is “Well, you’ve obviously been using it for a month and a half and must have dropped it… You’re SOL”.
Of course, this leaves the store open for fraud. If you dropped your laptop on the first day, there’s a good chance you could return it and claim it was damaged in the box when you opened it. You might even get away with it if you very carefully opened and repackaged it and made sure it was clean and tidy. The store offers a return window for a reason, what’s so terribly unreasonable about a 15 or 30 day window by which to unpack, examine, and test your new purchase.
You’re trying to dictate their satisfaction guarentee to whatever ammount of time -you- choose, they imply that if there’s something wrong with your product within X days, you bring it back and they make it right, and instead you’re trying to get X+Y days, where Y is the ammount of time you spend wanking off.
@KIRZEN2007:
Oookay, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today and only read the first three lines, I thought when Meg meant ‘opened’ that the customer left it laying around int he box for 45 days without ‘opening’ it and found the screen cracked by damage at retail.
My bad, I’d delete or truncate my post, but I can’t find a way to do so.
It’s a Dell.
Its model number does not begin with D.
OP had a Mac notebook, and replaced with a Dell that was not a Latitude.
I hope you get it replaced or refunded and all, but take this as a lesson.
@dandd, et al: of curse it cracks for a reason. Screws being too tight from the factory can be that reason.
But, really, folks, don’t get Dells. They were great up to the late 90s, yes. Alas, we are in 2008.
@Logan26: wow. I would like to have seen that before it got sent off!
I’m with the folks that recommend accidental damage protection. I’m not overwhelmed with Dell’s quality myself, but I always recommend their laptops solely because of CompleteCare. One of my coworkers accidentally ran over his laptop with his car and they replaced it, no questions. That kind of protection is hard to beat, especially with a unit you’re going to take everywhere.
@Draconianspark: you can get solid plates that support blocks of concrete made of the same material as battery springs. Poor comparison. An LCD screen is far more fragile than a glass window pane.
@backbroken: the outlay of money usually for income or profit : capital outlay; also : the sum invested or the property purchased. If I need a car (which is not rapidly depreciating in value) to get to work and back, how is it not an investment?
lol i smell BS… do people understand glass doesn’t break by itself?
@KIRZEN2007: Uh… at my local Best Buy someone at the Geek Squad will open the computer at the service counter immediately post-purchase for you to check that everything is in working order, and to walk the buyer through the initial setup (Vista takes an eternity to do this, especially on a low-spec computer with only 512MB RAM; this I learned from interning at the Geek Squad). Is this not done everywhere?
Note- I hate the commenting issues.
this guy lost me when he said this “Considering that I have seen laptops that have been dropped, kicked, traveled with, taken apart, stepped on and beat to hell and still run perfectly”
Really? laptops that made it by being dropped, kicked, and beaten to hell? By who this guy? I’m sure theres a handfull of laptops that can surive a drop. But more likely then not they day.
I’ve been on the end of complaints from people who have cracked screens insisting that it should be covered under warranty and it only is if you by accidental damage protection.
For a hinge to be putting enough pressure on the LCD to crack it, the consumer would have noticed that the screen was a lot harder to open than his old iBook, and should have gotten that fixed under warranty.
I had a customer in once, who had a laptop with a problem keyboard. Some of the keys were coming off, which was covered under warranty. We advised him to come in and get it fixed, but he decided that he didn’t want to be without it during the repair time and that he’d keep using it as it was.
About three months later of them came off, and got stuck sideways cracking the LCD screen. He neglected the problem with the keyboard which caused the problem with the LCD screen. His screen was not covered under the warranty.
He screamed up and down that it should be covered because it was caused by a fault in the keyboard. But he was aware of the problem and neglected to get it fixed for 6 months.
LCDs don’t just “randomly crack”. There has to be physical force on the screen to cause it too. And if the force is being created due to something else being wrong with the laptop, it’s your responsibility to send the laptop in to have that “something else” repaired before it causes another issue. Otherwise the second issue is caused by the customers neglect.
@dandd: Since you were apparently there, please tell us exactly how you’re sure you’re right.
@opfreak: I’ve dropped a laptop before. It had a cosmetic dent in the case but it ran fine until it went to someone else and I got a different laptop.
@backbroken:
I’m sorry, but any laptop that is purchased, the user should also get extended warranties thru the OEM of the laptop, not the store they bought it at.
Oww. Must have really hurt to go from years of pain-free use on an Apple MacBook to buying a Dell, opening the cover and experiencing instant suckitude.
Don’t worry, though. I’m sure that Dell’s well-regarded, seemingly irrationally over-the-top customer service will make up for it.
For fun, compare/contrast your experience with the experience Consumerist staff had with their laptop: [consumerist.com] Write a report (longhand, I’d presume).
Remember: If It’s Dell, It’s Swell! Or, is that, “Hell!”
Out of curiosity, is the Letter Writer majoring in Masochism? They’re getting extra credit for this, right? Right?!
LOL. Screens don’t crack for no reason. I believe about 8% of the crap I read on this site.
@mgy: I do take exception to your classification as what I did a “scam”. I never misrepresented the damage… Sure, I made up a story about how the damage occurred…
Look, if you’re going to lie your way – oops, sorry: making up a story – into scamming a company, man up to it. To do otherwise is just simply pathetic mewling.
@cerbie: There’s a reason why the English language has both “purchase” and “investment” within it. Might want to look them up and compare/contrast.
@backbroken: Do you even know what an asset is?
@redhelix: Sigh.
If you want to equate an asset with an investment, then you have a point. But the terms are not perfectly interchangeable.
It’s getting off topic.
Ok, I just wasn’t born to let things go. Sorry for going wayyyyy off topic.
from dictionary.com (not authoritative, just easiest to cite):
Invest-
1. to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.
Like I said, you don’t invest in a laptop (or a car or a pizza). If you do, you do so poorly.
Again, sorry. I’m done. Slam me again if you like. You win. Next topic.
I have seen a laptop LCD break for no reason. A friend of mine had a very nice Toshiba laptop that he purchased at Future Shop, along with their extended warranty. After he was done using it one day in front of the TV, I watched him close the lid on the laptop, at which point we both heard a light ‘crack’. He opened it back up, and a diagonal crack was running all the way down the screen. He hadn’t slammed the lid hard, just closed it in a normal fashion.
He brought the laptop back to the store – after all, it should have been a manufacturing defect if the screen was fragile enough to just crack like that. Despite having an extended warranty they insisted that he had “somehow abused it” and refused to cover the cost. This is why extended warranties are usually crap – they will find any possible way to deny your claim if they can.
Hmm. I’m posting this on a Dell Inspiron 5100. It’s about six years old.
No problems here.
However, I did know someone with a Dell laptop that brought it inside from a cold car and then had it a bit too close to a heater once they brought it inside. Crack.
I’m betting on temperature damage rather than a defect.
@kimsama: Note that in this case, a warranty that merely extends the time of coverage would not make any difference. Dell has decided that the damage is accidental, which is not covered by basic warranties nor extended warranties. What would have been needed is a warranty against accidental damage.
I used to recommend extended warranties on all laptop purchases but I don’t anymore. Accidental damage warranties were always a case by case decision as far as I was concerned. Never bought one myself. Never accidentally broke my laptops either. I used to buy extended warranties on my Dells but that was mainly because they had deals for students that made the extended warranties free or something like $50. Out of 3 Dell laptops I owned, one of them developed a motherboard issue which was covered by the extended warranty. In this specific case, I was able to save money because of the warranty. If I had paid full price for the warranty however, it is not clear that I would have saved anything. Motherboards for that laptop were very much available, at really cheap prices and I have enough technical skill to change a motherboard (yes, even a laptop motherboard, omg!)
For my fourth laptop, I decided not to get an extended warranty. Multiple factors played into the decision. One is that there’s been a good push towards standardization of parts across laptops. The situation is certainly not as good as for desktops but it is better than it used to be. On my previous laptop, you could not put in a PATA drive without some sort of special Dell-only adapter. My current laptop (not a Dell) just takes SATA, end of story. My previous laptop took a Dell-only wireless module. My current laptop takes a module which works across multiple laptops. So maintenance is easier. Parts are easier to find, etc.
Another big reason was that I knew that for the second year of the life of the laptop, I would be either in India or Taiwan doing research. (Now I know that it is going to be Taiwan.) All the laptops that were on my short list had warranties and extended warranties that were domestic only. They are domestic in the sense that the manufacturers require that the repairs be made at a repair center in the same country you bought the laptop. Your warranty is still good while abroad but then you have to ship the laptop internationally to get it repaired. Shipping costs are yours and the time without a laptop is your problem. So if I took an additional two years of warranty on my laptop, half of it would be wasted. Even international companies write warranties that do not provide simple international coverage. That was certainly the case with Dell last summer when I checked their warranties. I think HP had international coverage by default but I did not want to buy any of their laptops.
In addition, I bought the laptop with a credit card which offers automatic warranty extension and some limited accidental coverage. This is automatic and costs me nothing so I lose nothing if I can’t use it because I’m abroad. I’ve read all the fine print of our credit card, we don’t carry a balance, we don’t have bogus finance charges, etc, etc. So it is free to me.
So there are good reasons not to buy extended warranties or accident coverage. Not everybody is in the same situation you are.
@backbroken: You’re not the only one who’s tired of people calling any purchase of a car or laptop or big screen TV or pizza an “investment”. It irritates me to no end.
Laptop screens do not simply crack, just because. The customer, or an element in their house, broke this screen, and now he is trying to whine because he took a gamble. Dell makes trash, but I don’t buy into this.
And even if some product was more sensitive to closing than others — not a known issue I have heard of in a company that markets and repairs these Dell laptops — it would not have happened when he closed it after writing a paper.
@ooby: Gotta disagree with you on this one, truthfully it does not really matter what you plan on doing with the laptop.
The price should be a factor, obviously if you spent $600 on a laptop a $200 or more warrenty probably does not make sense. However, if your spending over $1000 on a laptop you should always get extended protection.
For example, got my Dad a laptop for his home use. It sits by his easy chair, and travels from there to his lap and back again. It does not leave the house, all he uses it for is websurfing and e-mail. We bought the extended warrenty and it has more than paid for itself. Just sitting in the house, not travelling, and lightly used we’ve had to replace the harddrive twice in the three years he’s had it. That right there is enough for me to know that just having that extra protection is a good idea if even just a plain, lightly used laptop can have issues.
@backbroken: Investing is the acquisition of an asset. Period. There’s no gray zone here. I’m not getting my terms confused, you are.
@Trai_Dep: purchase does not involve getting a return. Really easy, there.
@backbroken: “1 : to commit (money) in order to earn a financial return
2 : to make use of for future benefits or advantages
3 : to involve or engage especially emotionally “
I’ll grant you on pizza and a TV. Tools qualify absolutely for definitions 1 and 2 of the verb. You are acting as though 2 and 3 do not exist, and only most narrowly interpret the noun.
Take off the blinders, then. You ‘invest’ in what you hope to gain from having and using the laptop v. not having and using it. The laptop is an investment in something else.
@mgy:
“We had applecare…they don’t cover physical damage. I was very firm with the guy on the phone…I said that I was carrying the machine..and the weight of my palm forced the lcd panel to warp and crack.”
So you lied about how the laptop was damaged so it wouldn’t qualify as “physical damage”, even though you suspected it got stepped on, which would have been non-covered physical damage.
“I do take exception to your classification as what I did a “scam”. I never misrepresented the damage,”
Yes, you did. You made it sound like an issue with craftsmanship rather than being stepped on.
“and they were, at all times, able to refuse service. Sure, I made up a story about how the damage occurred, but their policy doesn’t discriminate based on the situation.”
And that somehow makes lying more acceptable? And you stated that their policy doesn’t cover physical damage, so the situation DOES MATTER. They wouldn’t cover someone stepping on the laptop, so you made up a story that takes the blame off the owner.
“It doesn’t matter if it was dropped, groped, punched, or destroyed by the hands of Zeus.”
Apparently it does, since you stated “We had applecare…they don’t cover physical damage.”
escalate.
@cerbie:
Good points. Return on investment isn’t all about money. Non-monetary benefits count to, such as saved time, pleasure, satisfaction, etc.
It’s a common mistake that people make when they think economics is about money. It’s not. It’s about scarce resources, which can be anything you’d trade for something else.
This story is one that should be a good example of why big purchases and anything really expensive should be put on a credit/debit card. Very good layer of protection.
@mgy:
Don’t feel bad about scamming Apple. Apple scams people to. Just look at the newest headline from Consumerist which states that Apple won’t redeem more than 5 gift cards from 1 person. So, you Apple gets what it deserves.
You cracked it. If you are a computer geek of any kind you would know that LCD screen don’t crack without some kind of user force.
Putting too much pressure on the back of the display where the dell logo is, or warping it when you close or open it, it what could cause it to crack. Or you know dropping it, putting heavy objects on it, or cramming it into a bag with over objects on top of the display.
@moviemoron: Now that we’ve beaten the “invest” vs “purchase” argument to death, can we start another off-topic one on “to” and “too”?
I am the last person to buy an extended warranty, but not on a laptop. I have an XPS m1710 with complete care that I have not had to use, but it has several screen defects, one factory and one caused by a 2 year old and leaves. Since screens get dimmer over time I’m waiting on requesting a replacement.
I have done IT support for 100 employee companies long enough to see many things happen to laptops. It surprises me they can sell complete care as cheap as they do. BUY IT!!
Dell or any other laptop, buy accidental insurance.
For that matter, any item that is going to moving a lot, by accidental coverage.
Believe me, if this would have been HP, they would not have replaced your LCD either.
Sorry to say, however it was a bad decision on your part not to buy warranty with accidental damage coverage.
Some of the suggestions here seem to be that if you don’t buy an extended warranty, then when your product breaks during its warranty you should be SOL.
To which I say, WTF?
Companies like Dell would really like you to believe this. Their profit margin on extended warranties is mind boggling. For every extended warranty they sell, they have to replace an extremely small amount of equipment.
But put another way, companies are now strangely trying to indoctrinate the public into thinking that their products are absolute crap, they won’t stand behind them and if they break, you’re a dummy for not buying their overpriced insurance.
To which I say, WTF?
If a company doesn’t stand behind their product, don’t buy it. If they don’t stand behind their warranty, then take action until they do.
@Aladdyn:
Thank goodness we have you to be the arbiter of that which is useless, funny, and witty. How we got along without thus far is inconceivable.
Since you seem to be sarcasm-impaired, the OP simply inferred that the poster dropped the machine and didn’t ‘fess up, a theme presented by more than just little old me…
The EXACT same thing happened to me while I was within the one-year non-extended warranty–and, of course, after my hard drive had already crashed (much love to Dell). The Dell representatives convinced me to pay for a replacement myself (600$ is no small sum, especially for a student) and refused any sort of on-site service. Fortunately, I thought the better of it the next day and called them back after reading the contract.
My advice, dig in your heels and prepare for a fight, but FIGHT IT! If not on principle, then because it’s worth the money it’ll save you in the end.
Call the first-level people at support and be kind, but they’ll refuse again and again. Then ask for an escalation. They’ll refuse as well, again and again. Ask to speak to a supervisor. Every time, cite the pages in the contract and quote the exact words that say Dell will be responsible for defects in the product, that the basic warranty covers hardware (and don’t let them tell you a monitor doesn’t count), and that the standard contract covers FREE and NEXT-DAY on-site repair, which is a clause they’ve already violated by not providing. You can be courteous and angry at the same time, but don’t ever cede an inch. One person eventually told me it was impossible for a screen to develop a crack without my dropping the computer, and I agreed I found it hard to believe they’d manufacture a product poorly… and then the next person I spoke to said I’d admitted dropping it!
Write back to every email customer service sends you, and send others to their supervisors, demanding the honour their contract. Call back every day. Mention arbitration; mention small-claims; be angry but not ranty. Refuse to send it to them for repairs–who knows when you’ll see it again?–and demand on-site service.
And when they finally agree to cough up (or in my case refund the money), follow up immediately to confirm they’re going to do what they said.
It took me countless phone calls over at least four hours a day every day for six days to get them to replace the screen (and after they twice cancelled the on-site repair–leaving me waiting in my apartment for someone to show up all day–and then stalled another month to credit my account).
And then never buy Dell again.
LMAO at all these “I will nevah, EVAH buy Dell again!” commenters, yet they nevah, EVAH seem to want to state what PC they WILL BUY/HAVE BOUGHT!
FYI: This post submitted from a 2005 Dell Inspiron 6000 used for light gaming, photos, music, light videos, Office, etc. without problem #1 EVAH surfacing!
h… ‘m prbbly trpl-pstng by nw. rlly ht th cmmntng systm.