Ah dear, less than a year old and kaput. It’s rather a long winded story, but here I go anyway!
Originally I got an Inspiron 640m for meself but it turned out to be so much faster than the Inspiron 9100 I had at work that I started to use it for work. So work kept it. Which was good, because another Inspiron 9100 we had broke and my old one was nicked for parts.
Then a couple months of later it was decided by the powers that be that us developer types should have fully Vista capable laptops, and who I am to disagree with an order like that?
So a Dell Precision M65* was my replacement (and a Dell Precision M90* for the over dev monkey since he wanted more powaaaah!). And off the Inspiron 640m went into the unwashed masses of the rest of the company.
And all was well until a couple of weeks ago I get a call saying the trusty old Inspiron 640m wouldn’t power on. Odd I thought, and it was shipped back to our office. And indeed it wouldn’t. Just a green flash of a battery light and off it went. Great…
So I took it apart and found a sticky goo underneath the keyboard and on the chassis. I looked further and it seemed to be on edges of the compartments on the bottom of the laptop and throughout the machine. I asked if something had been spilt on it and the reply back was a negative.
A bit of investigate led me to one of the motherboard supports (i.e. part of the plastic outer casing) which looked to have melted. I managed to peek at the mobo and noticed it had scorch marks. The support was on the left hand side of the machine, next to the fan mounting which is just above the CPU.
So it looks like it had burnt itself out. Cause of? Unknown. But very strange.
Anyway, the little bugger was scavenged for memory (since I’d upgrade it to 2GB) and put to one side, waiting for some spare time to ring Dell support up (not a fun job). Still, it’s a bit of a sad end to what was a very good machine.
Well maybe not for World of Warcraft, regardless of what other peeps say…
* Ignore the exact specs of the reviews on the Precisions. Our beasties both have Intel Core 2 Duo T7600’s running at 2.4Ghz with 4GB RAM and NVidia Quadro’s!
