Hi,

I'm frustrated and upset over this whole matter. I've spent a lot more energy and time on this than I feel I should have had to along with not having my computer available to me for nearly a month now.

At the time of the below, I had the 3 year coverage for wear and tear not related to accidents. Sorry, I'm unable to recall the coverage types name at the moment.

So, onward to the problem itself and how trying to get it remedied came to fail.

The basic problem is that my M14X laptop began creaking in the hinge, rather suddenly actually, so that when I raised the screen a horrible cracking noise occurred. It was torquing the casing when I would open it so that the monitor was beginning to jiggle loosely at the left hinge, leading me to contact costumer support over the phone who advised me  to send my laptop to them for repairs and inspection. So I sent it to them with a sticky note on the top to open carefully, because the torquing effect of doing so was exacerbating the issue.

The laptop arrives there and I get a call concerning the "state" of my laptop. The Dell representative's stance went from helping and repairing to questioning directly, how did I damage it. Confused I explained the creaking and the conversation that lead to sending the Laptop to Dell in the first place. The Dell Representative reproachfully denied my explanation, because the laptop was now CRACKED open on the left side, the hinge yanked out. That was not the way it was when I sent it, which again met denial from the representative. The representative DEMANDED I show proof that it was not that way before sending it and that I should have taken pictures... Basically, as I imagine it, whoever took it out of the box ignored my note and seemingly opened the laptop willy-nilly and didn't want to face up to having made it worse. I did not think to take pictures before sending the laptop, because nobody said I should, and it was my understanding that it was going to be fixed, not made worse.

As this conversation continued, the response by the Dell Representative was that they would have to replace the whole screen "if" they were to effect any repairs at all.  Because of the trouble and the denial of coverage and four and a half hours of phone time, I canceled the $400 3 year coverage plan I did have, because they wanted me to pay $400 more to do this replacement of the monitor that my existing coverage should have been handling already. The representative was very resistant to the cancellation, though the representative did not help any further in the hinge problem.

Now after having the laptop returned to me, I've been doing research on the damage, primarily at first in an attempt to fix it myself and now because It has enlightened me to several problems Dell Alienware laptops have had in the past that I was unaware of before.

A similar problem happened largely to the M11 series and sporadically to the later series models. I understand from another Dell support thread here that the M14X does not share the same hinge design and hasn't seen very many reports of hinge problems, but the question becomes, just because a majority of the customer base hasn't suffered the problem, why does that exclude my coverage of wear and mechanical failure that I didn't cause? (Let alone the extremely unethical response I got concerning the fact the hinge problem was made worse by Dell technicians and not owned up to.)

So as I said above, I canceled my coverage because it was by the Dell representative's viewpoint, not their responsibility to cover this unexpected hardware malfunction. I'm here, because I'm hoping as I've found in many tech forums that the help tends to be more knowledgeable than phone scripted tier 1 or 2 representatives who can't or are unwilling to do anymore than the prescribed and/or/if sitting on paper in front of them.

Thank you and please advise,

-Hayley