I previously mentioned that my brand new Dell Inspiron XPS m1710 notebook broke down just a few weeks after I got it.

It took from Wednesday to Friday to arrange for pick-up n the notebook.

The DHL guy came to my house on Monday morning and picked my laptop up. He said that the official line on these is that I will get it back in a week, but usually they get them back in a couple of days.

On Tuesday I received an SMS saying that my laptop has arrived to repair centre and then another saying that it has proceeded to repair. Nothing happened on Wednesday but on Thursday I received another SMS, again saying that it proceeded to repair. On Friday I finally called back on the XPS support line and got an answer that my laptop is fixed and currently is being tested and that I will most probably get it back on Monday as Dell does not use the delivery option to deliver on Saturdays.

And finally today at 11.00 in the morning a DHL courier knocked on my door with my notebook in hand. There was a note in the package saying that the CPU has been replaced.

All in all - 10.5 days from first report until the laptop is fixed. I assume that is the worst case scenario. The techs on the phone were competent, but did not have the information about what I went trough in their online diagnostics wizard and did not have the information about emails that I sent them. One tech answered me on the phone, but another answered my email. There could be more integration there. Also I could not find any way to see more details about the progress of the repairs on Dell website - that should be easy to provide.

In an ideal world, in cases when it is clear that the problem is in hardware, but not in the hard drive, it would be great if Dell could provide a temporary replacement laptop for the time of repair and put the hard drive of my existing laptop into the temporary replacement notebook, so that I an contiue working like nothing happened. It might not be the same spec, but it must be easy to swap the hard drive in, so I suppose that means that the same model is required.

Note: just as I was starting to write this post, a Dell Customer Advocate commented on my previous blog post. They sure deserve some plus points for that :)