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April 28th, 2023 17:00
Vostro 5481, design flaw in right hinge?
Vostro 5481
Hi,
I have this 5481 laptop since dec 2019 but started using it june 2020. Prior to this laptop I had another laptop from the same series that shared a similar design. Within ~3 years of usage of the current one, and 7 months of usage of the other vostro, I noticed both laptops showed cracks on the top left corner, in the very same exact place.
I moved on with my life, assumed it was my mistake, replaced the palm rest, etc, but at this point, this is the 4th time I run into this issue with Dell laptops, and 3rd with one particular vostro 5481 and when I asked around, it turned out I am not the the only one.
Since it got very annoying and frequent I decided to investigate further what might be causing the issue, and It turns out: the left hinge requires more force to push than the right hinge. It is very obvious when you try to push it yourself, maybe the following video won't show it much, but you can see how moving the left one may even lift the entire screen while moving the right one, smoothly slides back and forth.
ejn63
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April 28th, 2023 17:00
More likely, since neither HP nor Dell design or build notebook computers, they simply switched to the same original design manufacturer.
All notebooks save a few (Samsung, LG and a few Lenovo models) are made by the same small pool of mostly Taiwan-based manufacturers (Quanta, Compal, Pegatron, Wistron and a couple of others).
bxxl
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June 3rd, 2023 13:00
@ejn63 Thanks for sharing this info, I actually did not know... I always assumed designs are made in-house in the US... A few years ago, I had an HP laptop that explicitly said "designed in California" and it sounded weird they needed to mention it, I guess it makes sense now why they mentioned it explicitly since it is not the norm.
On a side note, I think I may have found a workaround for my issue, I will give it a try and report back if it works.