So, a friend has been having some issues with two of the six Dell computers he purchased in January. One of the three Dell XPS 15 laptops is on its way back to Dell for ‘repairs’ – It never worked, it would crash or not boot if the wired ethernet connection was removed.
The other is one of three XPS 8900 systems he has purchased. On this one, it would randomly freeze, requiring a hard restart. After much trial and tribulation Dell sent a service tech to his site yesterday afternoon to replace the motherboard… It hasn’t solved the problem.
However, what has prompted this post, is that the service tech told my friend that it doesn’t appear that Dell QC’d the machine before it was sent out since none of the moving parts were ‘lubricated’ and that this was undoubtedly causing ‘excess heat’ which would explain the problem we were seeing.
Hard drives and fans are the only moving parts on a computer as far as I know. I never heard of ‘lubricating’ them before, has anyone else?
That’s the computer equivalent of blinker fluid or muffler lube or sending the n00b to the supply closet to get a box of tree line or a pail of shore line.
It’s bogus.
Any lubrication on these laptops will be factory done and they will be sealed. There are no lubrication points for end-users like you would find on cars.
I wanna be a smarta55 and post "I don’t know what these people are talking about. Everyone knows modern computers have no less than 6 grease cups at locations 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 in the accompanying photo which must be watched and topped off no less often than every 108 minutes of operating time, or at each boot up whichever comes first.
and a (hopefully obvious) smirk like so
But another part of me thinks this isn’t funny, so I’ll settle on this post talking about it instead.
Yeh, I was wondering if the tech wanted to subtly encourage my friend to ‘lubricate’ the machine himself when it crashed again (about two hours after tech left) so as to void the warranty.
At this point with a 33% failure rate, I am beginning to wonder what has happened to Dell’s quality control…
except instead of begging a sysadmin for more space, you’ll just see your monthly bill go up by $2.00 every month for your overage…
This reminds me of one of my favorite “chuckle loudly at my cubicle” sites (sense of humor required, concepts may be NSFW, and you will hopefully, find something offensive if you dig around long enough) which, sadly, has, without my consent, been abandoned for some time. Thankfully, for now, the wayback machine has a cache. If I could find my checkbook under the pile of chicken feathers here on my desk, I’d donate to web.archive.org just for keeping this around.
Oddly, even these guys don’t seem to mention “lubrication”, as such…
“and irresitable to the ignorant masses” describes MS OSes perfectly.
I remember the Novell days and how they would just run and run and run and run at 100% utilization while NT would BSOD over traffic loads that Novell would just laugh at.
This was my original thought, and if that was what he MEANT then it makes some sense that poor heat sinking on the CPU could case the random freezes we are seeing; however, I asked three of the people who were in the room with him and they all agreed that he said they didn’t lubricate the MOVING parts…
I remember that I had multiple Novell servers that ran for years without even a reboot, while the Windows servers at the time would be lucky to stay up for more then a week.
Wouldn’t they call it grease or the more correct “thermal compound” instead of “lubrication” for “moving parts”? ( In case anyone reading this wonders, though I’m sure no one will, “heat sink grease” does not lubricate a moving part. It is compound which fills all the thermally insulating voids between a hot electronic device, e.g. CPU, and a heat sink, providing better heat transfer and more effective cooling. As a humorous side note, this was one of the tricks used by GM back in the late 80s to combat the infamous “DOA HEI” and really threw “old school” mechanics for a loop, who would wipe off the gunk, put the distributor cap back on, and fry the snot out of the coil control module).
Yeah I doubt a professional would be so imprecise in his wording. There is
a moving part not mentioned, if it was a laptop, the hinge for the display,
but I’ve never seen grease used there.
At a bad job decades ago they used to try and convince people that their
“internet fluid” was low. Personal favorite.
In my experience from the early 2000s, Dell laptops were TOTAL hit-or-miss. They would have one model year that was fantastic, few problems, wonderful product, then a model year that was nothing but junk.
I had some type of Latitude from 2003 that rounded me out in college with no problems. My sister had one a couple of years later that didn’t work correctly (brand new) until we replaced her hard drive.
It’s not that their QC has taken a dive, it’s that the design reliability in my experience has always been spotty. This is part of the reason why I’m an Apple-only (when possible) customer these days… consistently high hardware quality.
I have purchased hundreds of DELL computers over the years, starting in the late 80s, and have only had 7-8 ‘duds’ in that time. Of those duds, two were in the last two months. One from a batch of three laptops, and the other (the one discussed here) from a batch of three desktops. Seems like a pretty drastic QC change from my perspective.
The problem with Apple is that most business and more precisely their clients require the use of Microsoft software… For me personally, I prefer to build my own machine and install UNIX.
