| All I wanted was a "good" laptop to do basic stuff on, internet, word processing, and some light gaming. I first started out with an old AST premium exec 386 20 that cost a whole 1$ at a yard sale. That worked fine, put win 95 on it, bought a $40 battery, it was great, but it was heavy and not all that fast. So i decided it was time to get a laptop that could do more. So I went online and bought a Dell Latitude Xpi CD laptop for around $400 with shipping. When it arrived it worked great, the screen was bright, it could handle windows 98, and it was fast. It's a 166 mmx, had a 2.1 gig hard drive, and 48 megs of ram, and a 12x cdrom. That machine worked great for about a month, then i decided to buy s dock for it. This gave me scsi, and ethernet. Later on, i bought a pcmcia ethernet card. That thing worked for a little while longer, then a white line appeared about an inch down from the top. I called about waranty, and they said that it was under waranty for another month and i would have to send it in, and it would take a few weeks to repair. I said ill hold off, besides it wasnt that bad, and I really needed this thing for school. So I lived with it for a few weeks, then the whole screen turned green, or as I called it apple iie vision. I had no choice but to send it in. I sen tit, and in the mean time I used my old Zenith Laptop that I had bought on ebay a while before, I collect these things. Something happend with the password protection, so that thing is junk now, so I went back to the old AST, which at that time, needed a new switch. Not being able to find one, I soldered the two contacts together, hard to use, but worked. I used that until the hing broke off, then the screen slammwd shut, breaking it. I had a test that day, so i borrowed a friend's junk laptop, and had to fight to get my test off it, being it had no floppy, i eventually got it by retyping the test to a desktop, that night, the dellc ame back, worse than ever. There was a new screen alright, but also a new hole in the side made by UPS by a forklift. The damn thing didnt even start. So I bitched. It was insured to I got a new one from dell which was nice, being I kept the 32 meg of ram stick and the hard drive when I originally sent it in. I added the new ram to the factory refurbished dell and maxed it out at 80 mb! At the cost of a month of no laptop. It was worth it. The performance was so nice! Thsi laptop came with a new ac adpater too. And a new dell bag! This worked fine until the screen flickered. I thought nothing of it. Then I opened it up and saw a solder came loose. I bent the wire down, and it worked fine, and occasional flicker, but no problem. I upgraded it to a 5 gig hard drive yesterday, 7-23-01. Installed windows, and was happy, then the screen went out and it smelled bad. I opened it up to fidn the lose transformer block had been keeping power to the lcd the whole time by arking to the terminal, damn lot of juice there! It had burnt the area around it black. Today I decided to solder it back. Pissed off this broke again, i soldered it. After reasembally, the solder came off not 5 min later. After 3 more attempts, i found that it was still arking, and the spark was so hot it was melting the solder. So I decided fuck this, and pumped solder all over that terminal. The thinf worked, but flickered out and never lit up again. I cussed dell out and ran upstairs to find a new inverter board on ebay. No luck, The damn baords cost around $95 for this thing online. Now that horrible piece of shit sits in pieces were i left it. Maybe some day I will fix it, but probably not. If anyone has a parts amchine I can have cheap, please email me. I doubt I will ever have a good laptop, so I leave with this; do not buy a dell Latitude XPI CD, its shit! |
