Laptop Advice

What a good looking little laptop. However this laptop is at the moment causing many customers a lot of grief. The problem is that this georgious looking laptop just overheats way to easilly. The graphics card is a BGA chipset and is moulded into the motherboard. You CANNOT remove it and replace it. ( You can on the xps 1770) If under warranty the laptop motherboard will have to be replaced. Dell has good technical support and will send an engineer who will replace the board for you free of charge. The headaches occur when you are out of warranty. Then you will need to take your laptop to a respected company like www.DellLaptopRepairs.com to have it repaired. This company is based in London and have seen this problem many times.

The way to repair this is to have the graphics card re-fluxed. This means using a machine or hot air gun to push flux under the graphics card chipset and make it sit properly. This needs to be done by qualified Engineers who know how to cool your board to stop warping and overheating as some novices have been known to blow the chipset. This reflow work however is not an exact science and even skilled engineers can some times overheat the chipset. This laptop is not for games. I know you will probably read that it is, but when you have seen so many of these graphics cards overheating like i have i would not reccommend a laptop for games.The overheating problem often occurs becuase of using this laptop for high end games or for using programs like autocad that push the graphics card hard.  Never use this laptop on the bed as covers often block the fan causing overheating. Some engineers will force the fan to stay on permanently in order to make it work like a desktop computer and have the fan spin constantly. This is often a good idea as it cools the laptop down well and on the dell website you can even download some software that controls the fan. This problem can be fixed you just need to take it to a well respected company for an efficient repair.

A couple of years ago I typed the words ” Best laptop to buy ” In Google.  The laptop that came up top was the Toshiba Qosmio. I was horrified becuase these laptops suffer with graphics card problems. So i decided to try to understand why so many companies were trying to push this laptop as a good laptop to buy. The screen was the major selling point as it has a very high resolution good quality x black screen. Then i found other companies saying it was great just so that they could make a sale. Laptop repair companies have seen this laptop in thier workshops many many times. The sad thing is that often it cannot be repaired as the graphics bga chipset is moulded into the board and cannot be changed. Even Toshibs laptop repair companies like www.ToshibaLaptopRepairs.co.uk are refusing to fix this laptop as thier is only a 1 in 10 chance of repair by trying a re-flow on the chipset.  The best thing to do is buy a new motherboard however it seems this is a very common problem and you may as well just purchase a new laptop. The sad part about all this is that many poor customers have paid well over £1000.00 for this laptop and havent seen great returns.