4/7/2005
${EndoftheWorld} + 2
So it’s day 2 after my beloved Inspiron 8200 bit the dust. After what began as a rocky relationship has ended in doom. Oddly enough I’m typing this on my Inspiron 5000, which was suppose to be returned to Dell over 2 years ago but they never sent me the shipping label and by the time they realized their mistake it was nearly a year later so I didn’t bother. Bad me.
Why is it odd that I’m writing this from my 5000? Well because I originally called to complain 3 weeks before the 3 year warranty expired on it about the few usual things going wrong with it, hoping that I could get some parts before the warranty ended. Fraying power cord, cracked plastic around the screen, cracked plastic on the whole case, messed up cooling fan, really nothing major.. except the fan wouldn’t cool enough and the system overheated under real intense loads (i.e. compiling for hours). The Dell tech must have missed a day or two in training because his immediate question was “Would you like us to ship out the parts and you can replace them yourself or would you like a new system?” Hmm, let me think about that? Yeah I’ll go with the new system. “Well sir, as you know we don’t ship the 5000 series anymore. We will have to replace it with a different line, most likely a 5050 series.” No really, don’t give me free upgrades to a system that’s 3 years old because I was bored one night and had nothing to do other then complain about something cosmetic.
I settled for the long wait of next day and in came a box from Dell. I was convinced that it was just another system my father ordered for his company, I put it in his car without thinking why he would have gotten it shipped home (it was summer break from school.. I was visiting the parents… hence why I was bored enough to call Dell). He brought the system back home and handed it to me. It turned out to be an Inspiron 8200.
I noticed a red “Refurbished” sticker on the bottom and immediately eyed the system cautiously. This might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Especially since it only carried the remainder of the 5000’s warranty, which was about 3 weeks. But who can complain when Dell sends you out a $2,800 system (I priced it out online), everything was set to the max, even got an expensive carrying case. Only thing it was missing was a Mini-PCI WiFi card, but a $30 purchase got me a Truemobile 1300.
Immediately upon boot, after being wowed by the 15.4″ 1600×1200 native resolution screen, I noticed a slight squeal coming out of the speakers, like a bad ground. After a quick talk with Dell, it had been fixed and was a non-issue apparently. I tried again, once again snubbed. Why couldn’t I find my favorite Dell tech in the world?! Surely he must have friends! Well, about a month later battery life went from 1 1/2 hours down to about 40 minutes. That was sure quick. But hey, it’s a P4. The battery situation didn’t improve. It continued until Doom’s Day 8200-style.
This past summer (that’d be 2004), I drove up to Camp Lohikan to visit Jamie, my girlfriend at the time. She was working there for the summer. I had let her borrow this trusty Inspiron 5000 for the trip and somehow she managed to make it not boot. She also had my digital camera and needed to download pictures off it to free up space. Knowing I wouldn’t want to do tech support after an 18 hr drive, I brought the 8200 along for the ride. I packed it up nice and tight and put it under the car seat. No movement. Well, once I got up there we ended up being busy, quick hop to NYC where I showed her around, etc. Never got around to downloading the pictures off the digital camera. Instead of bought her a disposable and another memory card for it. So basically, the 8200 stayed packed up nice and tight and protected the whole time. Only possible thing could be the heat.
Upon returning to Florida, I brought the 8200 in and set it on my desk. Power… 3 quick beeps and no power! Odd… Try it again… Same result! Over and over. I took it apart and reassembled it. Now it powered on and beeped as if I was holding down a key, which I was not! It continued to boot and I quickly found out that no key worked. The only key that worked was the power button. After several days of tinkering I devised a system of connecting a separate keyboard and tapping the NumLock key so the light would come on and off as the machine powered up and booted, oddly enough it was a certain point in the kernel boot process that if I kept the light flashing at the right rhythm then it would make the external keyboard work. If not, the light stopped cycling and neither external nor built-in keyboard worked. Could it have been a specific kernel version or versions? We’ll never know because one day I put the corner of a textbook on the built-in keyboard (at this point the keyboard became a resting place for things), it suddenly started spitting out letters. From that day on the system was back to it’s previous state as when I had gotten it, except battery life which was at 15 minutes.
${EndoftheWorld} - 5. The day things started to go wrong, very wrong. I had been working with my 8200 and set it down on my bed for a little while. And like all laptop users know (or should know) cloth is really bad for heat, the system gets real hot and the fan has to work real hard. Well I could just hear the fan kick it up into overdrive but I was still busy with something else so I left it there. Moments lately, like the distinct crack of a rifle going off, I heard it. The worst sound a man can ever hear come from his machine. The loud click/bang of the HD head slamming home and resetting the whole drive. The machine proceeded to have a fit of this and nothing became usable. A hard power down was required. I let the machine cool off and booted it back up. Everything was back to normal. I chalked it up to the HD overheating.
Now let me rewind a little, as if this story isn’t long winded enough, ever since laptop-mode entered the Linux kernel with 2.6.6 I believe, this laptop began to do strange crappy things once it moved to battery power. For instance, the first time this laptop would go on battery power it would begin a process of HD spin up and spin down. Which seemed logical during battery times, sometimes a bit excessive but understandable. However it never stopped this, even when plugged back in. The problem would get worse the more you unplugged and re-plugged it. The spin down delay seemed to be getting shorter and shorter. The only fix would be the reboot the machine. It would become so bad that during an emerge –sync the HD would begin to spin up and down… up and down…
${EndoftheWorld}…. I was casually working on my laptop on some ebuilds. Nothing intensive, just recently did a fresh boot so everything was find and dandy. Suddenly, the click/bang, reset of HD happened. I couldn’t recover. Powered off the machine. Now as soon as I power it back up, when the kernel attempts to mount the root filesystem, it immediately starts spitting out endless DriveSeekError msgs. The system refuses to boot. Also magically from this process the battery life has managed to drop down to a ballpark of 20 seconds.
I’m sad. I lost so much. So many digital pictures. So much good code. So many school projects that would have been fun to keep. So many useful bookmarks and web tidbits. So many Tomboy notes. All gone. 
I can’t end a story on a sad note, there is one good thing. I’m getting a new Dell Inspiron 600m. But they won’t be shipping it until April 18th. Bleh! Long time to wait. But it’s got features galore. Stuff I wanted.
- Pentium M 1.8ghz
- 768mb RAM
- 60GB HD
- DVD+RW dual layer burner
- 802.11 b/g
- best resolution screen avail
Filed under: 2 Responses to “${EndoftheWorld} + 2”
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April 7th, 2005 at 7:26 am
That sounds pretty bad, maybe because it was a refurb?
I personally have had my Dell Inspiron 8200 since June 2002 (and my warranty is dwindling), but the only problems I’ve had were cosmetic with the screen, which has been replaced several times. I realize I should probably call in the warranty — get new plastic rests, replace the fan assembly because one has lost a bearing, and my battery life is down to about 1 hour 45 minutes (from 2.5 - 3 hrs) on 2 batteries; however, I am quite fond of the resolution
And I haven’t seen anything comparable offered — on top of that, it supports linux very nicely.
About losing all of your data — couldn’t you put the drive in another machine? It had seek errors, but maybe something to attempt…unless it’s a complete lost cause.
(found your blog through planet gentoo, if you’re wondering why I’m crazily posting to it :))
April 7th, 2005 at 10:05 am
Damn… Interesting post. I was thinking about getting a Dell, but they’re more expensive than the HP Compaqs. Now I better do some research on the reliability of the two brands before I buy.