13 R3, faulty factory build?

Question

My Alienware 13 R3 would not turn on yesterday having been working fine the day before. The symptoms were with the power pack plugged into the laptop the LED on the power pack would come on briefly then go out when the power pack was turned on, however when unplugged from the laptop the LED on the power pack came on and stayed on as expected. The laptop being out of warranty, I decided to take the back cover off (for the first time) to see why it appeared to be overloading the power supply. I was appalled to find that one of the wires to the coin-cell battery had been trapped under the computer base cover during factory assembly and squashed flat onto the system board ground plane. Just for good measure one of the speaker cable wires had also been trapped under a battery alignment tab and also squashed flat. Photos: https://imgur.com/a/YQtMlLK I am assuming that the insulation on the coin-cell battery trapped wire has gradually displaced under pressure and finally allowed the core to short out to the system board ground plane. This in turn is causing the power pack to overload. I explained all this to Dell Technical Support and they told me, 'Given that it worked satisfactorily for 4 years there cannot have been a factory build fault'...!? They had absolutely no interest in seeing the photos that prove otherwise, presumably an inconvenient truth. Outcome: no free support, IMO extremely poor for such an expensive laptop. Does anyone know if my assumption is correct? What is the consequence of shorting out the coin-cell wire to the system board ground plane and will removing the short fix the problem or will the system board have been damaged? Thanks for your help. Alienware 13 R3 spec: i7-6700HQ, GTX1060, 16GB SDRAM, 512GB SSD, OLED QHD touch screen

Trygon · Answer

Here are the photos (I had trouble uploading them before).

Overview:

Coin-cell (insulation cut through by computer base screw, wire core shorted to system board ground plane

Speaker cable (squashed flat by battery tab):

-ends-

DELL-Chris M · Answer

Given that the 1 year purchased warranty expired 3 years/4 months ago, Dell UK Support was correct in their policy statement. Your only recourse is to pay for the Out of Warranty repair.

Trygon · Answer

Hi Chris M, Thank you for your input, I have one simple question: Do you believe my Alienware laptop was correctly assembled at the Dell factory?

Alienware

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