Goodbye Dell - XPS 17

I'm writing this post out of my grief and disappointment.

It is a little over 3 years I have been using my XPS 17. Bought it for work to my office in my own company. Having quite some experience in gamedev (10+ years in industry) I have already worked on Dells with luck. No wonder my next choice was Dell as well. I'm a software developer - I need a good laptop. Some of my industry friends and even employees warned me, that Dell is not what it used to be - I ignored it. Bought l702x - now I regret it.

I had constant problems almost from the beginning:

First I had very bad quality LCD, very grainy, I felt cheated. Dell Support replaced it for slightly better one.

Next I had the common issue with falling off power cable. Again, Dell Support replaced it for the cable which still was too thick and too heavy and fallen only twice a day.

After that I have realised that some (if not most) of the internal modems doesn't work with this hardware. I had 2  of them at my office. One of them was Dell branded. Both didn't work. To this day I'm not using modem with this laptop - notice, that there is a SIM card slot inside - brilliant joke.

Speakers - people say it is so cool piece of hardware. Well - I don't get it! The only thing which makes this hardware sound so 'cool' is probably the piece of software delivered with it, which makes it 'sound better'. Without it, in comparsion to other brands it is really bland. Not to mention the speakers placement - right under your palm - great thinking - to hear something during work I need to use headphones or take my hands off the desk.

Later 2 cursor keys lost their plastic coating due to regular basis (though frequent) use.

At this point my battery started to fail - probably falling off cable caused it to malfunction.

Another issue I had was quite common top cover hinge breaking off from the plastic. I had to fix it myself because I needed machine at work. What I have seen there inside made me laugh - small plastic bulbs with 3 screws had to keep all this force - you don't have to be major at physics to notice this one is going to break in probably every model.

Apart from that the main issue - constant overheating. If you work in graphics department - you have a problem, when you work in gamedev department - you have a problem, when you just want to play games - you have a problem. What are temperatures? Around 100 Celsius degrees - this is a temperature of the boiling water. With such a huge case Dell engineers could easily fit there something better.

So that's it. I'm saying goodbye. I'm already looking for another laptop. I will think twice before buying another Dell laptop - well actually I think I won't use anything from Dell any more. That goes to my company, employees, friends and family. I don't want to feel cheated again. Why this post? Well - maybe I have spent 3 years feeling bad and I wanted to share my frustration, maybe someone is considering buying dell and this will help with the choice, maybe you have same hardware and it starting to show its nature but still have a chance of giving it back.

Good bye Dell,

Disappointed user.