Manufacturer Warranties and Protection Plans

[ev5unleash]

Hey Guy,

Well, let me explain my situation. I bought a Dell Laptop from Bestbuy a couple months ago. It's under a Dell | BestBuy partner warranty; therefore it must be fixed by the Geek Squad. First, my Dell laptops system files kept getting corrupted. I was thinking it was a bad image of Vista so I reinstalled it; a week later another file got corrupted. I repeated the reinstallation and reformatting of the drive for a couple weeks until I decided the faulty device was the hard drive. I took it to the geek squad and explained my situation. They also believed that this was a hard drive issue.  I was quite disappointed by the immense length of time it took for the Geek Squad to replace the hard drive. After finally get my laptop back, it was only a couple weeks before another corrupted file message appeared. I was furious that despite their work, the same issue occurred again. Convinced my hard drive is defective, I decided to take it to my local BestBuy again. I received a call stating that it had returned the repair center, that there was no initial problem and that Ubuntu was interfering with Vista. I haven't heard of this in my life! I've done the exact same things on past laptops and my current desktops with no problems. I reinstalled Vista again, but using my own version of Vista (32-bit). It works for the time being until I receive an error message about a corrupt file.

Despite my problem not getting solved, I was wondering what is the amount of times needed to be in to repair before you are eligible for a replacement? I would do anything to not have this laptop anymore and just get at least store credit and buy another computer from a different brand. I'm very disappointed with the quality of the computer I have bought from Dell.

Computer: Dell XPS M1330 Laptop (Intel) (64-Bit)

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo (2.00 GHZ)

RAM: 4 Gb

[Adamtech Emerging Expert]

I apologize for the issues you are having with the unit. Have you ever considered that the issue might be a software program you might be using? Under a service plan, the unit must have hardware repaired/replaced 3 times and in need for a 4th hardware repair before replacement is considered.

[Dorothy-BBY Community Supervisor]

Hey ev5unleash -

Aaron from our Community Connector team should be looking into this situation for you.  You can expect him to reach out to you in the next few days.  Thanks!

[ev5unleash]

Hey,

Thanks for the quick responces, This is giving me some positive look at BestBuys Support. I have considered it to be a software issue until I realized I've been installing the same programs and updates on a different machine. This expierement being failed; I attempted to test the hard drives for physical errors. I was given a message by the program that a couple of clusters are bad on my drive. I don't see how this is possible by the fact that I rarely move the laptop itself and I don't recall doing any physical abuse. These random error messages are making this computer unreliable when I need it. For now, it seems that windows CHKDSK recovered the data from the bad part of the hard drive and reinstalled the corrupted system file for the time being. I'm going to take it to BestBuy as soon as I can to rectify this issue before my warranty expires.

[Adamtech Emerging Expert]

When does your warranty expire?

[ev5unleash]

It seems my warrenty will expire December of this year.

[Adamtech Emerging Expert]

Hopefully we can figure out this issue before then.  I have no doubt that we will. Lets wait to hear back from Aaron and see what he says.

[Aaron-BBY Community Connector]

Hey ev5unleash,

Like Adamtech mentioned, products under service plan coverage qualify for a “No Lemon” replacement once they have accrued three previous qualifying hardware repairs and a fourth confirmed hardware failure.  I regret to inform you, however, that this does not apply to products with only factory warranty coverage.  Additionally, most products will typically only be replaced by the manufacturer when repairs prove to be uneconomical or parts are unavailable.

As far as your laptop’s hard drive is concerned, remember that bad sectors are not always caused by physical damage – they may just as easily be the result of improper formatting or factory defects.  Without being able to physically examine your laptop though it would be difficult to determine the exact cause of the problem.

I would like to take this opportunity to gather some additional information from you, so please keep an eye on your private messages (the letter icon in the upper right-hand corner of the page) for further communication.