Welcome to the forums :smileyhappy:

Unfortunately - choosing not to pay extra for an additional x years warranty, is obviously the chance you took at the time of purchase.

So unless you get in touch with Dell before the warranty period runs out, and ask them if you can extend your warranty period (assuming you are now prepared to pay for that precautionary measure of course?)... I'm afraid there's nothing you can do.

"C'est la vie" +/or "Pay your money - and take your chance" - as they say!

The only real option is to buy the extended warranty before the initial warranty expires.

In my opinion, Dell should give customers an option of changing the GPU to ATI or something if they want. But, that's not an option at this point, so you really SHOULD buy an extended warranty for 3 more years. Laptops are bound to fail at one point or another. Not buying a warranty now, but calling in later won't solve anything but you will end up paying 500+ for a replacement motherboard. You'd be better off paying 300 now for 3 more years. Then, if the laptop dies for any reason, (monitor could die, dvd-rw could be dead, etc..), your laptop will be fixed under warranty. There are things that can happen even with functioning GPU.

extending the warranty is kind of a solution but not a real one... the warranty will run out of time at some point and then i can't use the device anymore (and of course you can't sell it, because no one would buy such a risky device). i know that taking only one year of warranty was kind of a risky decision but the main problem is that the problem with the graphics cards is NOT solved -> the service was not fulfilled properly IMHO. i know that it's not dell's fault but nvidia's but that doesn't matter for me because i'm the stupid one in the end. i don't want to sound whiny but if i buy a car and the brake stops working after some time, they won't just replace the brakes with other bad brakes, just because they have no proper solution and they won't give me a firmware upgrade so that i only can drive at half the speed so that the brake won't die so fast...

btw. i read or heard somewhere that i now have 1 year of warranty on the new graphics card. is that true and does that change anything?

Unforunately some things cannot be changed - and yes, manufacturers DO replace problematic parts with semi-fixed problematic parts- Chrysler has been doing it for 20 years with the faulty overdrive automatic transmissions, which have never been made particularly reliable.

If you extend to a 3-4 year warranty, that's the best you can do - by that time the system will be nearing retirement age anyway.  

The problem for Dell (and the other vendors that use these chips) is that nVidia hasn't been very forthcoming with details about the problem.

I agree. The only real thing to do is extend the warranty.

Personally if my XPS M1530 is still funtioning by January (Got it in February) I´ll extend the warranty.

yeah, sure i'll extend the warranty, i've nothing else i can do because i am the weaker one. but i hope that it'll be like with the pentium fdiv bug where ALL faulty cpus where replaced for free. i think it'd be fair to give the customers one of the following options:

- free upgrade to the new graphics card series

- free downgrade to the intel graphics card + some money back 

- free warranty extension 

but life isn't fair and companies are even less fair in general. btw. it'd be fun to have a program that could kill the gpu in a week or so, i think dell would consider an alternative solution rather fastif such a program is available...

There won't be a new graphics card series for the 1330 - that's out.  The model will be replaced when the time comes.

Dell won't downgrade your mainboard, so that's out.

Don't look for a warranty extension - it looks as though nVidia isn't covering the cost of these warranty replacements entirely, so since it's costing Dell money, they won't extend your warranty for free.