On Tue, 14 May 2013, Roger <arelem@bigpond.com> wrote:
The screen had several faulty pixels which showed up after she installed ubuntu 12.04. The shop took it back, reinstalled windows and put it on the shelf again. Some unsuspecting windows user will not know or care about such trivia. Her replacement works very well.
One problem with screens is that the higher the quality you require the lower the yield will be. To get acceptable yields (IE to manufacture screens cheaply enough to sell at a price customers will pay) manufacturers have often set a quality level below that which most users desire. An anecdote from ~10 years ago concerned a vendor which had a 30 damaged pixel return policy and a customer with 28 damaged pixels. That must have sucked. Some years ago I bought a discount EeePC701 which had been returned because of a couple of bad pixels, that got me a 30% discount and was totally worth it. About 12 years ago IBM stopped selling Thinkpads with 1280*1024 screens, they went back to 1024*768 as the maximum resolution for just over a year. I presume that was because the yield on 1280*1024 screens wasn't high enough to support good profit margins at prices that customers were prepared to pay.
It's best in some ways to buy from the manufacturer if possible to reduce the number of hands along the way. With that in mind, Dell straight out flatly refuse to honor warranties if windows is removed and they will not install anything else.
It depends on what Dell stuff you buy. The only Dell warrantee request I have ever made was from a PowerEdge tower system that gave an ECC error when running Memtest86+. They had a technician on site the next day with a spare motherboard just in case. It turned out to be a dodgey DIMM, with replacement RAM the server has now been running for over 3 years without a problem. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/