My Vostro Timeline

7th September 2007

Ok, seeing as I’m off to uni soon, I decided I needed a laptop. I had a look around, realised that now wasn’t the best time, but it’s also not too easy for me to go without for a few months. Anyway, I had a good look around the major UK stores and realised that for what I wanted £700 was the normal. I didn’t like this, and remembered noticing something about Dell Vostro laptops being cheap (or something like that). Now, I’ve always associated dell with being bad, dunno why, must of been someone elses opinion. First I wanted to see about Dell’s student options, Big company must have good student deals. Standard address to try would be www.dell.co.uk/students , this takes you to what I surmise to be an American only site. After searching around I find out that www.dell-sci.co.uk is a better option. Dell’s student computing initiative page looked promising, until I started to use it I looked at the specs of the machines on offer, and the price tags, and couldn’t see how dell got their “Regular Pricing” values. Anyway, I looked a bit deeper and it seems you get MS Office 2007 Pro (on student license) and 3 year warrenties. One big thing though, Dell doesn’t let you customise these very much, if at all. So you’re stuck with what they give you.

I wasn’t too pleased with this, so checked out Dell’s standard site, found the Vostro under “Small business” and customised it a bit. When I was happy with my Vostro 1500 I put it through to the basket, this adds VAT and Delivery (something that “Home” prices have included). Well this put it up to about £650, further digging made me change some of my choices, “Do I want the stupidly over-reflective screen?”. Got it down to £622. Ok, checked the laptops in the “Home” catagory, couldn’t beat the price for the spec. Tried other major retailers, and couldn’t get the spec for the price. Started looking into the Vostro 1500 reviews, and discovered that it’s good and bad, heavy but better built than other Dell notebooks.

So, simply because if I was gonna get it I needed to order it, I did so on the 5th Sept. Due the 18th Sept according to Dell.
I’ll add more once I get the laptop.

8th September 2007

Am surprised to see my order has been dispatched, but not happy that the courier tracking system doesn’t yet have my order. I have also just found out that the courier is appalling (Google “Dell Walsh Western” to see the reviews).
I’ll let you know what happens.

11th September 2007:
Right, laptop arrived this morning, and am impressed with first looks. Not impressed with the way it’s running right now, and it still has some crap installed (google desktop, McAfee Security suite 30 day). The system isn’t as responsive as hoped, but did come with recovery discs. I think I will be wiping the drive completely to install from scratch, keeping only what I really need, plus I want ubuntu, since I don’t always trust Vista.

Wiped it this afternoon. I had 4 partitions; A hidden EISA config, A recovery partition, my main partition, and an unanmed partition which is dell mediadirect. Removing the last three left me with about 148GB (the EISA one is only 128mb). Using the Dell Vista reinstall cd, I split this into roughly two even partitions. Currently I have set up windows vista, minus some of the crap originally on here.

13th September 2007:
Right, checked the camera out, seems fine I must of been imaginging that it was funny. Oh and further about the graphics drivers, seems that it’s an Nvidia issue, not all their drivers support their mobile graphics cards. Laptopvideo2go has some Nvidia drivers and how to install them (requires downloading their zipped version and replacing an inf file, not too difficult). Now, about that hard drive clicking/clunking. It’s been mentioned in a comment on here, and I’ve now had a good listen. It’s been happening since I got the laptop, but not really being able to say it’s the hard drive, I didn’t pursue it. However there definately is something not right, so I have e-mailed Dell’s technical support (i’m not calling a premium rate number, and their web chat doesn’t support vostro notebooks?? nice going Dell). The noise sounds exactly like this here, but mine isn’t so constant. I know it’s not the hard drive access noise, but it’s more a clunking, usually when the hard drive hasn’t done anything for a few seconds (no activity for abut 5 seconds, then clunk and sometimes more activity), so i’m puzzled, it’s not windows though because that’s stopped indexing (so activity is reduced). Thing is it does it when plugged into the mains and when running off battery, so I don’t think it’s a power saving thing either.
Finally read the user documentation (from Dell’s website, why they can’t give it to you in a booklet with the laptop, I don’t know) and decided to run some diagnostic tests. Inserted my driver cd which also has the diagnostic tools on there, and booted into it. Ran the express test, and all is well, so I manually ran the HDD (hard disk drive) standby test, which stops the hdd, not a single noise, but when the hard drive spins up after, there is the click. Not being in windows it’s definately not a windows related issue. Ran the hdd idle test which spins up the drive, and at 50% there is click again. Definately seems to be hard drive related. Still waiting on tech support to get back to me.

Another issue may of surfaced, but I need to confirm it. Strange buzzing/noise, happens sometimes, when plugged into the mains, might be a dodgy connection though.

14th September 2007
E-mailed Dell tech support again and got a reply telling me to phone their tech support number for the Vostro range. So I did. I asked how much the call would cost (just in case it was going to be expensive), 4p per minute during the day, that’s before 5pm, and 8p per minute in the evening, so 5 -8 pm. I was routed to a call centre in India, and am glad to report that for the whole 25 minutes I was on the phone, I was quite happy with the service I received. Now, I was asked to run some diagnostic tests (the pre-boot assessment ones), these were taking a while, and didn’t really seem relevant, but after explaining the problem in a little more detail, I was told to unscrew the hard drive mounting, and slide the hard drive out. In order to facilitate a replacement I needed to provide the serial number for the hard drive (It’s a Seagate ST9160821AS), and was told to re-seat the hard drive and screws. Reboot the laptop and see if the problem had been solved. Unfortunately the clunking noise is still there, and the next step is to send me a replacement hard drive. This is due on Tuesday. The good thing was that the person I was speaking to is going to phone me on Monday to confirm the hard drive has been dispatched, and then on Wednesday to find out if the problem has been solved. I was asked if I could install the new hard drive and install the OS, or if I needed an engineer. I can install a hard drive and an OS myself, so I didn’t see the need for an engineer. I will be waiting for Tuesday with eagerness, and I hope this solves the issue; More to come.

17th September 2007
Just received a phone call from Dell technical support (same person I spoke to previously). It would seem after talking the problem over with her supervisor, that the issue might not be the hard drive, but the CPU and entering the C3 power state. I’m thinking that this is unlikely as that issue causes a (fairly) high-pitched noise (dell know about this), maybe I’ve had that issue too?? not sure. My noise is definitely a clunking. Anyway, hard drive due to be sent out to arrive tomorrow, to check that the hard drive is not the cause.

18th September 2007
Ok, hard drive came today. Different manufacturer, this one is a Hitachi (HTS541616J9SA00) and it still makes the same clunking as the Segate, except that this clunking sounds less ominous and and more fitting with the general sound of the hard drive. Oh, the guy who delievered the hard drive wanted to collect my old one straight away, of course I wasn’t told this over the phone and so my Seagate wasn’t ready to be collected (it was still in the laptop being used), he had to phone up his company, who phoned Dell and got an authorisation which meant he didn’t collect the hard drive. I assume Dell will phone me to arrange the collection.

19th September 2007
Received the expected call from Dell tech support. Explained that the noise sounds a bit better, they still put it down the CPU. I know that it is certainly not the CPU making the clunking, but the Hard drive, and something to do with the internal mechanism (or possibly the bios, simply because the problem occurs when the system brings the drive up from idle, or into idle). I will try to find an answer since Dell won’t believe it’s the hard drive.

20th September 2007
More bad news. It would seem that the CPU issue is plaguing me now. I am getting the high pitched whining from the CPU. I can’t say how loud it is, but it seems to be so high pitched it can rise above all other noise in the room. Since it’s down to the actual processor technology, there is very little which can be done and apparently even the bluetooth fix (which I cannot do because I don’t have the internal bluetooth card) does not work. Depending on how bad this noise gets I shall determine a course of action. I swear I didn’t have that noise with the Seagate hard drive, maybe I should switch over (seeing as I still have it) and see if the CPU still does it’s high pitched whining.

14th October 2007
Dell have collected my old hard drive, which is good and bad. Good because they won’t charge me, bad because it would of been nice to have another hard drive. Anyway, the laptop is doing well so far, been using it most of the time, always on AC power (with battery in, which is probably not a good idea, but ah well). Funny noises can’t really be heard over anything else I do, so I’m happy with that, and yeah, it’s bulky, but I haven’t needed to move it around anywhere. Attracts dust quickly though, probably because it is black and you can see dust clearly.

12th May 2008
Been a while since I added to this, however I’ve just been rummaging around the dell forums and found something.  (I’m going to add it as a blog post too)  Anyway there is a solution (sort of) to the hard drive clunking.  Click here.
For the slightly more detailed post click here