Keith Devens .com

Instead of adding yet another complaint about my now out of warranty Dell M1710 and it's fried Nvidia graphics card, I will add a suggestion! If DELL will not be responsible, they must be forced to take responsibility! WE NEED A LAWYER to file a CLASS ACTION SUIT! It is obvious by the number of comments, that Dell is refusing to acknowledge that the M1710 is a grossly defective product! Further, Dell falsely represented this product in their print marketing. The M1710 was marketed as a serious GAMING Computer, yet it clearly was not designed to meet the requirements of serious gaming! Dell should be responsible for their use of the Nvidia graphis card and all related design flaws that ultimately lead to complete failure. They must be forced to replace the faulty product at their expense or issue full refunds to restore our loses! Surely there is an eager Attorney out there with the determination to force Dell to be to provide the cusomer service that we deserve! A $2500 to $3500 laptop should not become this worthless in 2 years or less!

Well Dell M1710 2.3 years old always run v. hot fan kicks in about 50 degrees then kicks out. I am on th third power adaptor. But finally bang all power gone black screen, went to tech support didn't take long less than 1 minute to advise motherboard problem, I wonder why became very obvious after reading many blogs. Customer support advise out of warranty, spoke to team leader about not fit for purpose and not of merchantable quality took my phone number promised to ring back, will they !
This is not acceptable by DELL THERE SHOULD BE A PRODUCT RECALL.

It should be clear to all Dell Laptop owners that Dell simply doesn't give a Damn about their customers. The XPS-M1710 isn't the only Dell Laptop affected by bad Nvidia chips. There are thousands of people who put their trust and hard earned money into the Dell Corporation and got royally screwed by Dell. This is even in light of the fact that Nvidia has acknowledged that their chips were BAD and paid Dell close to 200 Million Dollars to resolve all the customer complaints and problems. Dell is not doing this. They are declining to help anyone "out of warranty" and pocketing Nvidia's money (in my humble opinion). Warranty should have absolutely NOTHING to do with a product that was defective the very day it was built. I have had TWO GeForce Go 7950GTX cards go bad on my M1710. Dell support told me that the 7950GTX was not one of the cards affected. Nvidia says the opposite and I have that in writing. Even my Pennsylvania State Attorney General could not get anywhere with Dell. Needless to say, Dell would rather lose lifelong customers than make good on a defective product. They are most likely waiting for a Class Action Lawsuit because that will cost them less than replacing all the Laptops even after Nvidia gave them close to 200 Million Dollars. Some Attorney SOMEWHERE needs to help all the people that have been given the middle finger by Dell! I don't care what the Attorney's get paid as long as Dell is held responsible and all defective Laptops are made working----one way or another. Needless to say (and I realize that Dell could care less), Dell has lost another life-long customer. My business and those of all my friends will not be using Dell either. Simply put, Dell is raping the very people who put Food on their Corporate Tables.

Big thread about this here:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/brianmadsen/arch...card-on-my-xps-m1710-again-today.aspx

For your reference:- Copy of letter sent to the BBC consumer programme Watchdog 03/11/2009

Hi,

in August 2007 I purchased a Dell XPS M1710 laptop, for my own personal use, direct from Dell, for CAD design work and all the usual things one buys a computer for.

An expensive machine at nearly £2000, yes, but it came highly recommended by all the reviewers of this particular model.

It was lightly used, working just fine until the end of 2008, when it started to occasionally crash, showing the infamous "Blue screen of death", for no apparent reason. The erroneous error given, was due to a non-existent file called clkdrv.sys. The crashes were usually initiated during the use of large graphic AVI files. Perhaps this may have been a clue to it's eventual demise, reported below. The PC has never overheated or been abused in any way.

During the time that I have owned this laptop, it has been used (turned on/off) less than 500 times. This poor life, from a non-mechanical component, is just not acceptable, when mechanical hard drives are expected to last more than 100,000 hours.

Eventually, in mid 2009, it failed to start correctly, showing rows of dotted lines on the boot-up screen and refusing to load Windows XP SP3.

After running the system in Safe Mode, I searched the Internet to find a solution. I was surprised, and not a little annoyed, to find that my expensive, top of the range PC, had similar problems to those owners of the same make/model! The graphics card memory had failed and my laptop was nothing more than a very costly paperweight.

Nvidia, the manufacturers of the graphics card, and Dell have admitted there have been problems! However, if you are out of warranty, you are effectively stuffed! This just isn't fair. If your new 240 mph Ferrari refused to do more than 50 mph, after the warranty ran out, would you just shrug your shoulders and accept having to pay for the repair, when it was due to a manufacturing/design fault, with the likely possibility that it might happen again? I think not!

There is a fundamental flaw in many of the graphics cards fitted to these machines. Is it too much to ask that the manufacturers, Nvidia and Dell in this case, sort this out, at no cost to their long suffering customers?

I have spoken to Dell a number of times and the best their technical support (0870 366 4180) can offer, is a new card, guaranteed for 3 months, which would set me back, if I fitted it myself, the sum of £374.81. This equates to around 25% of the original cost! They would then be prepared to sell me a further warranty contract! I'm sure they would! I would also have to wait at least a month after placing an order, because there are thirty gullible/resigned owners already signed up and waiting to get a new card!

Can you please help myself and the many disgruntled owners of these machines, to resolve this matter?

Thanks in anticipation.

Regards Tim Stewart

cc Dell, Nvidia

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Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

Hi, 11/18/19
I have put 3 video cards at 350.00 a pop now my m1710.
it sit's worthless again with a dead 7900gts nvidia.i would like to scrap it at this point, but a class action lawsuit sounds good to me. where do i sign up? has someone got the ball rolling? or what? Geeorge Augst

I have the exact same problem. 3 cards down. Don't think it's worth replacing it again. Dell should do a product recall.

Please sign this petition if you have the same problem.
http://www.petitiononline.com/XPSM1710/petition.html

Please pass and post the petition URL around for others with the same problem to sign.

Thanks

FWIW I little while ago I called Dell support and they sent out on-site repair to replace my video card, motherboard, fans and heatsink, and my computer is running well so far. There is definitely a flaw with this model, but we'll see if the problem reoccurs with the replacement parts.

Mine went down about 15 mins ago. 300 days left on warranty. boots up with green vertical hash marks, and then goes black when windows starts.I'll keep ya posted.

Just to let you know, I have one of these Laptops and had the same problem, ie. Vidcard rang dell parts spoke to them told the what was wrong and that the laptop was 3 years old and they sent a replacement next day FOC all i had to do was return the old one.

Kevin UK

IF ANY OF YOU CARE. I STARTED PROGRAMMING AT 18 IN LATE 40S NOW. A MICROSUCKS PHONE FOOL ONCE ACCUSED ME OF LYING BACK IN THE WIN98 DAYS. i HAVE MY POS DELL XPS M1710 RUNNING AT 3.0 NO TURBOFANS ON WATCHING A VIDEO WITH A CPU TEMP OF 73 A GPU TEMP OF 50 ITS OVERCLOCKED 20 TICKS. I AM USING A GENERIC COOLING TRAY WITH THE NEW NINJA STACKED IN BETWEEN. I USED PROCESS EXPLOEER FREE FROM MICROSUCKS. FIRST USE RIVE TUNER AND CHANGE YOUR GEFORCE INTO A QAUDRO. THEN GO GET THE QAUDRO PERFORMANCE DRIVER. YOU MAY HAVE TO RELOAD PROGRAMS AND YOUR CODEX PACK OCCASIONALLY. THEN USE NVTRAY ENABLE ALL OPTIONS. BE SURE AND USE THE GUIDE AT GURU3D ON QUDRO SETTINGS. SAME AS GEFORCE JUST YOU ACESS ANY QAUDRO FEATURES THE GOOD OLE THIEVES AT GEFARCE HAVE TURNED OFF AT THE FACTORY. VIVA VOODOO! ANYWAYS. SO THEN I CHANGED THE DIRECT3D OVERRIDER INCLUDED WITH RIVA TUNER ALSO FROM GURU3D. OK NOW YOU HAVE A SEMI TO HIGHEND QAUDRO INA FAULTY CASE. I HIT OVER 22F AT 2.8. SO FIREDUP MONITORING PROGGIES. EVERY FUCKINTHING WAS GOING TO CORE ONE OF MY COUGH COUGH DUEL CORE. SO USING PROCESS EXPLORER DIVERTED ALL TRAFFIC THROUGH BOTH CORES INCLUDING THE BOOT. THEN WENT IN THE REGISTRY AND CHANGED ALL THE 200,000 SECOND WAITS TO 30 SECONDS AND SUCH DEACTIVATED ALL THE BUILT IN SPYWARE TURNED OFF THE EYE CANDY. CHANGED AUTO TUNING TO EXPERIMENTAL AND OPENED THE RECEIVE WINDOW TO 4 TIMES SPEEDGUIDES RECOMMENDED HIGHEST SIZE. ACTIVATED A BUNCH OF FEATURES BASICLY VISTA HANDLES THE INTERNET MY WAY INSTEAD OF MICROSUCKS WAY.I HAVE SEEN PEOPLE MOD THE CASE THEMSELVES OVERHEATING IS THE ISSUE THE M1710 CASE IS POORLY DESIGNED. I GOT IT FREE. I'D NEVER PAY CASH ONA DELL;). ANYWAYS I HAVE THE POS RUNNING AT 3.0 PLAYING A MUSIC VIDEO WRITING THIS CPU TEMP AT 72 USING 9% CPU GPU TEMP 49 THESE ARE CEKIUS OF COURSE. FEEL FREE IF ANYBODY NEEDS OBI WAN.

I have purchased two Dell PC's and have had no problems, however, last Christmas (2008) I purchased a Dell XPS for my 13 year old son for school work and gaming. The Dell XPS has been a nightmare-it has chewed or burned through at least 4 hardrives and Dell has been little help - and has only replaced the multuple hardrives -even though it has been at no cost-it is very frustrating for my son when the laptop dies. We have it running on a cooling pad which has slowed down the burning. We have purchased the extra special "in states" tech help-what a concept - talking to an american for tech support! If they do not resolve this by replacing this piece of SHIT with another line of their product - I have heard the XPS has been discontinued - we have friends who are running the same gaming software on other laptops- MACs or HPs - I am a certified paralegal and believe me - it only takes SIX (6) Plaintiffs to mount a CLASS ACTION lawsuit-I will threaten them with a suit in small claims court and publicity! Please add to the blog if you are a UNHAPPY DELL CUSTOMER!

I own a Dell XPS M1730 Core Duo @ 2.4ghz, 4G DDR3, 2 Nvidia 9800GTM @ 512MB each. I purchased in July of 2008 and it has run fine until recently. Within the last two months the batterey has crapped out, I have notifications that my RAID volume 0 is failing and now it is overheating to the point of shutting down which has occured three times this week. I paid a total of $3500 for this rig and have higher expectations for my money. I'd be interested in any legal remediations attempted.

I have an xps m1710 that I would like to over clock the heck out of, just because it has now become a desktop replacement (got a smaller laptop)I am seriously considering water cooling the cpu and graphics card and will if I can get some cheaper water cooling parts, radiator, pump, etc. If I get the proper cooling I will definantly follow your lead Dr. Death

Edit to previous post. I am on mother board number 3 power adapeter number 3 and graphics card number 2. Its a labor of love I guess.