Dell Vostro 1710 plastics won't withstand an official repairing

As I told you some posts ago, my infamous Dell Vostro 1710 laptop had its motherboard changed because of its integrated NIC's failure. Long story short: after the first replacement, the motherboard had to be changed again. I had major issues even during battery recognition (never heard of that, before), let alone that the system could boot every four of five attempts.

After 10 days (yes, ten days) fighting with Dell Customer Service, which, besides, tried to convince me that the problem was a monitor's failure and probably an issue with an older BIOS (A10, which was the same BIOS I was running before), they finally sent me another technician to change the motherboard once again.

It was too much for the poor Dell Vostro plastics. Here's how the plastic protection of the monitor's junction "survived" the surgery:

My suggestions thus are:

• Before buying a Dell Vostro, think twice (or thrice).
• If you plan to run Solaris (including Nevada or Indiana) and don't think that a 10 meters long network cable crossing your living room is elegant, absolutely do not buy a Dell Vostro.

Dell Vostro 1710 - A bad experience

I knew that when I'd buy it and install the Solaris OS, I'd have to give up the idea or having WIFI (well, sort of...). And to use the card reader, too.

What I didn't know was that this thing made of plastic was so fragile. The card reader slot broke at the first card insertion. Well, it doesn't bother me much.

The button and the mechanism of the PCMCIA slot? The worst I've seen, ever.

And now... no, I'd better tell you how it happened. I sat down in my sofa, brought the laptop and put it down in the table, plugged in the network cable and Solaris started to boot. Strange, no IP. Would the DHCP server be experiencing some problems? No, everything seems fine. The nwam service has gone nuts? It seems up and running. Restart it. No. Reboot the Solaris OS. Nothing. Unplug and plug in again. The IP has been assigned! Doh! Pretth strange isn't it? After a while, the network is done. And it was so that I discovered that the ethernet plug broke someway. The cable is there and seems well fixed but if you shake it, the network may fall.

Today I called Dell technical service and after the typical 20 minutes listening to music a polite technical assistant opened a ticket and tomorrow a Dell technician is coming to my house to change the entire motherboard.