Upscale wrote:


wrote in message
when the hard drive failed the computer was up and running in less than
24
hours and we had a more direct phone number to call to get warranty
assistance with out having to wait on hold for more than 3 or 4 minutes.

For $500 you could have bought several laptop hard drives, and they
are generally even easier to install than in a desktop or tower

Not necessarily. He didn't say that it was a removable hard drive. It may
well have been an internal one.

And this is an issue because? You can buy a kit specifically for the
purpose of upgrading internal laptop hard disks at Best Buy for under $200,
including the disk.

I'm not familiar with Dell as a user, but
I also suspect that their drives may be equipped with a semi-proprietary
OS that recognizes only their own hardware fully.

Then use a non-semi-proprietary OS that recognizes all hardware fully. XP
Pro full boat retail costs 300 bucks, and nobody in his right mind pays
list for it. You're out the door for 500, worst-case, which is the same as
the cost of the extended warranty. Since you're buying a drive anyway you
qualify for OEM pricing, so that's more like $150 for the OS.

In a case like that,
some off the shelf drive would be mostly useless. It's also possible that
some OEM drive could also void all warranty of any type.

Outside the US, perhaps. United States Code, Title 15, Chapter 501, Section
2302, starting at paragraph (c), states:

"(c) No warrantor of a consumer product may condition his written or implied
warranty of such product on the consumer's using, in connection with such
product, any article or service (other than article or service provided
without charge under the terms of the warranty) which is identified by
brand, trade, or corporate name; except that the prohibition of this
subsection may be waived by the Commission if -
(1) the warrantor satisfies the Commission that the warranted product will
function properly only if the article or service so identified is used in
connection with the warranted product and
(2) the Commission finds that such a waiver is in the public interest."

system. Did the extended warranty include data recovery, or just parts
& labor?

I've never heard of any retail warranty that includes data recovery and
most certainly, no $500 warranty of *any type* is going to include data
recovery costs other than an OS recovery CD. If you consider that every
user experiences a hard drive crash at one time or another,

How many experience one on a machine under warranty? The extended warranty
doesn't last forever you know, and it only covers the one machine.

Dell would
have been out of business a long time ago if they included Data recovery
for the relatively paltry sum of $500. Data recovery costs thousands of
dollars in time and labour.

And if one out of ten machines needs data recovery they can spend 5000 bucks
on the recovery and still break even. If you check pricing, you'll find
that 5000 bucks is at the high end of what a single-drive standard-priority
data recovery will cost. For 500 bucks on a typical laptop I'd expect
something beyond replacing the drive. Now if it also includes
broken-screen coverage it's probably reasonable.

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)