I just bought myself a nice 8 core Intel I7 & 17" LCD laptop from Dell, it's predecessor was of course famous for being the host of my C++ lectures that so many of you have watched.It doesn't work, keeps turning itself off.Dell can't get it to work, they've replaced the motherboard, GPU, etc still won't deliver.Dell is flatly refusing to refund, so I'm taking them to court.So my question is whether this is just a rogue machine or whether there is a serious design or other flw in the Precision Workstation range, which are the top of Dell's product line, my laptop cost £2K (call it about $3,000), so I had hoped it would work.As you know Dell has history in denying that that there is a flaw in a product range, most notable the evil capacitor case where Dell screwed many of it's customers.So if you have had issues with Precision workstation laptops let me know because not only am I suing Dell but I am talking to TheRegister, Europe's top tech website about writing my experience up. (we get 1.7 million readers a week).

I am sure they are shaking in their boots. Hope you have a good and expensive lawyer. edit: in all contracts, there is a 1-year warranty bla.. Do you have the contract?

Do you still have the laptop? If so try running Ubuntu (or whatever flavour you like) from a DVD and see if it reboots from there too.

Cuch I have a 3 year next business day support contract, but they are saying it's a "technical problem", ie they've lost the plot.I do indeed have an expensive lawyer, part of the joy is that the "escalation team" are claiming that the problem was fixed.Fortunately a partner in a very large international law firm watched the tech try to fix it and the machine fall over before he even left the building.I also have the details of the tech and an email log where minutes later I complained and of course phone records.In spite of that they say he fixed it. I feel some sympathy for the poor woman left to defend that position when her own people are not telling her the truth.She seems to be dealing with this by something that marketing people do a lot, which is to never ever answer their phones, but instead pick those messages that they feel like replying to.dd3 it's definitely a h/w problem it sometimes dies before loading the O/S which is now horribly corrupted, my first article about this is describing how Windows copes with being turned off every 20 minutes for a few days.The short version is badly, but not as bad as you might think.

Looks as if Dell are acting dumb.

PROCESSOR One Intel Core I7-2860QM (2.50GHz, 8MB cache, Quad Core) GRAPHICS CARD NVIDIA Quadro 4000M with 2GB GDDR5 MEMORY 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel (2x4GB)LCD 44cm (17.3") UltraSharp? FHD (1920x1080) Wide View LED-backlit LCD Panel HARD DRIVE 750GB Serial ATA (7.200 Rpm)OPTICAL DRIVE 8X DVD+/-RW Drive Slot LoadINTERNAL HARD DRIVE SATA or SSD Hard Drives, Non-RAID for 1 Hard DriveYour machine is probably something like this (http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstor ... sion-m6600). That's quite a lot of serious hardware inside, which probably generates quite a lot of heat too. I have the desktop version of that Nvidia Quadro 4000 which does get quite hot, but not as hot as some of the older Nvidia cards. Maybe the little guy is overheating? Worth checking the cpu/gpu temperatures. I used to own a Precision laptop (not as beefy as yours), which died about a year into use, due to screen failure, so in truth it lasted it's useful life. I've had my (home) desktop PCs turn themselves off when summer arrives and the fans can't keep the machine cool enough. I always thought about getting air-conditioning fitted, but that's not been needed in the UK summers for the last several years!

1) I'm surprised Dell didn't just swap the entire unit. Intermittent power failures (as opposed to lock-ups) are more likely to be caused by problems in connectors, wiring, and the analog tidbits than by software, motherboard, or GPU.2) Your reassuringly expensive lawyer will know whether a refund should be offered by Dell or whether Dell need only repair/replace the defective unit.

Quotea nice 8 core Intel I7 & 17" LCD laptopA minor point: It is 4 cores and 8 threads. I've heard its nothing like having 8 cores.

QuoteOriginally posted by: MiloRambaldiQuotea nice 8 core Intel I7 & 17" LCD laptopA minor point: It is 4 cores and 8 threads. I've heard its nothing like having 8 cores.Yes, true. More like [4, 5) than 8. Had to turn off that Intel marketing hype(r threading) in BIOS as it doesn't really serve a useful purpose, afaict.

QuoteOriginally posted by: demhaQuoteOriginally posted by: MiloRambaldiQuotea nice 8 core Intel I7 & 17" LCD laptopA minor point: It is 4 cores and 8 threads. I've heard its nothing like having 8 cores.Yes, true. More like [4, 5) than 8. Had to turn off that Intel marketing hype(r threading) in BIOS as it doesn't really serve a useful purpose, afaict.Hyperthreading does help in some applications. Elsewhere on these forums, some folks tested performance vs. thread count for an MC app and found that each hyperthread added about 1/2 core worth of performance. Thus an 8-core, 16-thread machine was about as fast as a 12-core, non-hyperthreaded machine.Your Mileage May Vary, of course....***edit** here it is:

By-the-bye, I bought this Sony VAIO F12 Z1E/BI / Intel Core i7 740QM 2.93GHz / 8GB / 500GB / Blu-ray / 16.4 inch / Windows 7 Home Premium / Laptop / Notebook / Blackfor under £1,400 in 2010. It's been really good.Please don't think I mean to rub your nose in it. I hope you get a refund and can save some money by buying something similar to mine.

Cuch: Yes they are acting dumb, but I believe this is a side effect of a smart scheme to stop customer refunds.demha: Yes, that's pretty much the system I bought, Dell included a couple of fans that duct heat so well it seems cooler than the 2-core laptop it replaced. Fans do get clogged, but this was too new for that to happen and the fans appear to be of superior quality.Traden4alpha: Yep, they should have swapped it whilst they had the option, but I suspect that end of Dell is "incentivised" not to do swap outs.I did explain that not only can I write this up in the tech media, but also that I do have the Reassuringly Expensive lawyers. It gets worse.They've written to me claiming that the proble was fixed, in spite of the written record from their own tech sent to see that machine, the fact that a REL witnessed the machine die before he left the building and the log of events on their own system which I sent to the escalation team. I'm not saying they are lying, merely that one part of Dell is saying things that the rest of Dell knows to be false, so they're lying or incompetent but I can't tell which.Milo: It's between the two, if there were a discrete 8 core laptop, I'd probably have bought that.eh: Thanks for the tip

My brother had problems with Dell too years ago and it only got resolved once he had filed a claim in small claims court, but this was in Ireland.Apple have form here too

I actually did not know about Dell screwing so many people with the bad capacitor issue. Read a NY Times article about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/techn ... &src=busln They don't seem to have moved on really.Question is, where do we buy a good quality high end machine these days? Dell/HP/Apple are to be equally avoided.

Demha, yes Dell screwed many people and those were specifically who chose Dell. In any purchasing decision from a laptop to the air traffic control system for Germany, someone says "I think X is the best offer". That may be the top guy or a minion, but he should now be the vendor's bestest friend.The saying "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" was partly based on the way IBM would ensure that the "brand specififer" was not left out to dry, not because they were nice but because they were smart.IBM forgot this and dropped very hard.The Dell capacitor issue was an example of leaving your supporters at customers in the firing line to save a few bucks. I recently talked to a guy who personally chose Lenovo for 8,000 top end laptops for his bank. He was happy with them, enough that he told me about it, sadly they don't do a 17", so I bought a Dell.Dell don't understand that in the 21st century customers talk to each other.Actually that's not quite true, some managers realise that, but the company as a whole does not, so once I started to make a bit of a fuss some low level drones got involved. However they couldn't actually get the tech to admit there was a real problem and thus couldn't do anything about it. Since Dell doesn't really get it, it also employs people who say "I will call you" and "trust me I will have this sorted out in 30 minutes" and who don't. and then Dell management tells front line staff not to respond to emails, and then it goes badly.