[mech]

Hi folks. I had the misfortune of my STEC SSD crapping out on me 3 days ago. Luckily I still have 20+ days on the 1 year warranty and Dell is already shipping me a new one (supposedly 2-3 business days) and I expect it by Friday.

My questions/poll:

1. Do you think it's a good idea to get extended warranty from Dell for the mini? (
2. DID you get the extended warranty from Dell for the mini?
3. How much was it and for how long?

I seriously debated getting warranty for parts for the mini when I called Dell to sort out the issue. I'm now not very certain of the build quality of the mini 9. I rely on it quite heavily in academia, but was also thinking that if the harddrive goes bad again within a year, I will switch to a Runcore or Supertalent, which will have their own warranties and are so much faster. I have a few weeks to make my decision about the extended warranty (4-5 days before it's expiry), so any feedback is appreciated.

When I called Dell and spent ~2 hours being transferred back and forth until they finally deduced that the drive is dead (I used gparted and disk utility to confirm; the tech had me reseat the SSD; Diagnostics from BIOS could not be run, which I'm not sure why that happened), I asked them about some warranty quotes. The 1st lady was giving me a 1 year warranty at a discount for $88. The next guy was giving me inconsistent quotes for 1 year, for 2-3 years and for 5 years, all at varying prices anywhere from $47 to $260. The 4th guy, a manager, only gave me 1 option: 1 year warranty for parts at $160 and didn't understand why the others were giving me such varying quotes. Could be software vs hardware warranties.

Anyway, enough of the sob story, but I hope Dell is reading these forum entries and improving their services accordingly.

Thanks,
MEch

[Thorsteenster]

The warranty is just for the SSD or the whole system? I wouldn't bother if it's just the SSD, I'd put that towards an upgraded one.
I wouldn't bother either if it's an extended system warranty, but that's up to you. All my Mini's have come from the Outlet with standard warranties.

[mech]

Ya, it would be for the whole thing, so if the mobo, memory, screen or w/e craps out, it will be covered. But then, I might just put that toward a newer netbook/laptop if something happens in a year. I NEVER get extended warranty on anything. If the quality of these things is so flimsy I might not even bother as it just means more fiddling with recovery anyway. This is unfortunate as I really love the product. This was my first computer that I did NOT put together myself and I can see how the quality differs.

I'm lucky I got timemachine and cccloner going on my system.

[mech]

Got the SSD (refurb) from Dell today. That was fast! I'll hang onto this until it craps out and then probably will get a Runcore or upgrade the system altogether. I'm just not seeing the $150-250 warranty as a viable option as I could easily purchase a brand new or refurb netbook for that price, with a renewed warranty. If the warranty were $50, I'd be more tempted but the warranty is essentially the price of another netbook.

Currently transferring all my stuff onto the new SSD from a TimeMachine backup.

By the way, if you have to deal with this, Dell wants the defective part back and they want it within 10 days! Otherwise they charge you for the price of that part. That's annoying as now I gotta worry about babying their defective part and make sure it is shipped.

[mech]

UPDATE:

I figured I'd go all out and upgrade to 10.5.8 and change from DellEFI to NetbookInstaller.

I had a 10.5 install USB from last year kicking around and used that to reinstall OSX on the new SSD (GUID journaled). I didn't realize this, but restoring a TimeMachine backup does not restore the system fully, i.e., I ended up restoring a 10.5.6 backup onto a 10.5 fresh install. Many things weren't working when I did this, but I was able to use software update as Airport still worked.

I decided to just apply all available updates at once. While this was downloading, I decided to prep the system by deleting dsdt file and /.dellefi and /extra. This messed things up a bit such that I couldn't restart properly, therefore doing a hard restart. No updates were applied.

Booting from the USB, using -x -v brought me to a safe 10.5 mode. I reapplied just the 10.5.8 patch, and it found the downloaded one from the previous step. Everything went to 'Running Installer Script' with progress bar close to done. It hung there for about 20 minutes and I just hard rebooted the system. Surprisingly, the system started up as 10.5.8, at which point I applied the NetbookInstaller. The next restart I booted off the SSD (all previous times were booted off the USB stick). The system started up smoothly without any errors and several annoying bugs were gone too.

I applied the rest of the updates and now have 10.5.8+NetbookInstaller 0.8.3. Looks like BT has to be fixed again in Terminal and haven't tested sleep yet. Haven't tested dual display yet either.

Overall, took about 4 hours for everything. 10.5 install took ~30m-1hr, TM restore took about 2hrs, downloading and applying the updates took another 1hr.

Hope this gives some people courage to dump DellEFI and switch to NI.

MEch


UPDATE 2:

Forgot to mention that after I restored my backup my user password did not work. I had to start up with the USB stick and reset the password (option under Utilities) on the newly restored system. Here is also where you can manipulate the admin password if you like.

[luni]

HI there, Could u give me some advice about claiming SSD on DELL wattanty? i have to deal with it so soon. According to fail of Damn stec SSD yesterday. Cheers

[mech]

well, give them a call. Have your mini handy and be near a power source because they will go through various test procedures with you over the phone. Once they confirm that it is the SSD that failed, they will ship you a new one (probably refurbished). Once you receive the new one, send the busted one back. Hopefully you have a carbon copy or time machine backup so you can restore to the new harddrive as it arrives.
For details on my steps, see previous posts.
MEch

[maddog]

Out of curiosity, did you tell them you are running Mac OS X in your Dell mini?

And, in my opinion, no I would not pay $160 for an extended 1 year warranty.
Nor for 5.
I'd invest the money in buying a new device later.