I just got my computer back today….after paying $500 for the third time ($2,500 notebook has now cost me $4,000) to get it repaired and they will not let me purchase any type of extended warranty on the machine either. I know the motherboard/graphics card will most likely fail again within the next six months or less (I have averaged 2 to 4 months previously) so I’ve just been looking to see what other options might help extend its life. Next time it dies, I won’t be repairing it.

Anyway, thank you for your advice and I’ll definitely download that free software!

Although I can’t say for sure that it will help with the overheating issue, I highly doubt it will help. The issue with the overheating has to do with faulty GPUs (graphics card chip), not with the HD. Although they replace the chip, they replace it with another faulty chip. I’ve gone through the experience myself and it looks like I’m about to need another replacement. I can tell you that I’m very angry at how Dell is handling this issue, and I doubt I will ever buy a laptop from them again! Not only that, but I’ve gone from recommending them to quite the opposite.

They’ve basically told me they will keep replacing the faulty chip for up to 2 years. After that, you’re on your own. And it’s never going to be replaced with a good chip, they are NOT going to fix the issue. Not only that, but each time the chip needs replacing, you’re out of a laptop for x days. And the standard line is 1-4 weeks. I asked what it would take to make this happen on site, and they said there was no way. I couldn’t even buy on-site service if I wanted. That’s brutal for a $3500 laptop (that’s how much mine came out to). I’m basically guaranteed 2 years of headaches until, at which point it will completely fails for good. They know there’s an issue, but refuse to fix it. Never again will I buy a laptop from them. Horrible horrible customer service. How can a company know of an issue (before they released it in the first place) and never plan to fix it ever, knowing that all the machines will die within 2 years. These aren’t $50-$100 machines, these are multi-thousand dollar machines.

In any case, if you’re interested, there’s a great little free software I use to measure the temperature of the GPU on the motherboard. It’s called HWMonitor. I highly recommend it. The only thing is that it will scare you when the temperature goes well above normal levels.

Great article. I had a question regarding using an SSD with an XPS M1330 and have not been able to find an answer elsewhere, so I thought I would throw this out there…

I understand that an SSD uses less battery power, etc. So will getting this type of drive also help my overheating issues with my XPS M1330? I am on my third motherboard replacement and am trying to figure out ways to avoid the overheating issue.

Thanks for any advice you can offer

And I agree, it’s a lot better to get a few better performance drives than a bunch of cheap drives. Firstly you usually get a better value for your money, but secondly, and probably more importantly, you have less chances for failures (the less HD’s the less failures).

I’d expect that you’d still get much better performance by having a smaller raid array of Intel or Vertex drives, than a bigger array of cheaper drives (assuming the same budget for each array), unless you do very little random writing.

Thanks for the link. I had actually caught that article when it was making the rounds on Digg, Reddit, etc. And I have to say, it’s the best one I’ve ever read on SSD. The guy really knows his stuff, and he explains it very well. Thank you again for pointing it out, I completely forgot to add it to the comments.

My only question is what happens when you start to build raid arrays of SSD’s? There’s an amazing video of someone working with 24 SSD’s in a RAID configuration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fmt=22

Although too expensive for me (I figure about $10k-$20k), what about connecting 2 to 4 drives in RAID. Would that basically remove the pauses, at least make them imperceptible? That would be great, and imagine the speed!!

It explains how the random pauses are caused by exceedingly slow random writes on some flash drives. On those slow SSD drives randomly writing 4KB blocks is many times slower than a standard mechanical hard drive, although linear writes are quick.