Sent a sick laptop, Dell returned a dead one.

August 4, 2023 5:16 PM

What are the right next steps when Dell returned my kid’s laptop in worse shape than when she sent it for repair?

We recently sent my daughter’s Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1 laptop to Dell in hopes of getting a screen repair. (She accidentally cracked the screen a little by closing something inside the laptop… over a few months the crack spread across the entire screen.) Hoped to have this fixed before returning to college, so we sent it to Dell for diagnosis and repair. They said they didn’t have the part and sent it back immediately. It arrived back home today.

This afternoon she tried to use the laptop, only to find that the battery holds no charge whatsoever. As in, power cuts out as soon as the charger is unplugged from the machine. This absolutely was not the case when we sent it.

Hive mind, advise me. I have Macs and this kind of BS doesn’t happen when I get my laptops repaired.

Did they forget to replace a battery? Did they fry it? How do we address this and get it fixed?

posted by Sublimity to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Does the laptop indicate that it is charging while it is turned on (plugged in)? Perhaps they took it apart and did not reconnect some internal wiring for the battery, or even just reseat the battery properly. If it does indicate charging, you are going to have to contact them, probably repeatedly, to tell them of this new problem.
posted by soundstripe at 5:23 PM on August 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

They sent you somebody else's returned laptop.

Apple did the same thing to me when I availed myself of their keyboard repair program, and it promptly failed in the same way.
posted by jamjam at 5:35 PM on August 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

This happened to me. Sent my Lenovo off for repair for one issue, it came back dead and not being able to charge. I was lucky in that I've got the deluxe warranty package. I kicked up a fuss (actually, I just ramped up the fuss I was already making because I'd been suffering a seemingly endless series of issues). I got tech support back to my place (my service says I'm entitled to at-home repairs -- sending the machine away had been an escalated situation). The tech agreed there was a legitimate problem. In the end, it all got fixed, but as I said, I paid upfront for a very expensive warranty on a very, very expensive laptop, and I was entitled to have the issue resolved.

The only recourse you've got is keep escalating your complaint until you can eventually speak with somebody who has the authority to fix the problem, and make sure they understand it's a problem they created. I suspect you're in for a long, hard battle. Good luck with it.
posted by sardonyx at 6:40 PM on August 4, 2023

Unless you recorded the serial number you sent in, you can't verify whether it's the same laptop or not, but it's very possible they sent a different battery back with the laptop.

Personally, laptops are cheat enough you can probably buy a refurb off of Dell's own website or Woot that's good enough for college work.
posted by kschang at 11:49 AM on August 5, 2023

If it’s still got the crack in the screen, it’s not somebody else’s laptop, but it could well be someone else’s battery, whether knowingly (they had someone else send in a laptop with a dead battery, so they scrounged yours before they knew they had to send it back) or not (stuff gets mixed up on workbenches).
posted by parm at 10:29 AM on August 6, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks, all, for the commentary.

An update: It's definitely the same laptop since the cracked screen is identical. There is *no* battery icon/information when the laptop is powered up (again, only when plugged in) and my daughter is logged in. When the laptop is plugged in and she's not logged on, the login screen has a battery icon with an X across it. At this point I think they just failed to put the battery back in.

We chatted with a Dell rep yesterday who offered for us to ship it back for free to look at it again, versus the $60 freaking dollars we spent to have it checked out the first time. Given that we're just going to buy another laptop for the upcoming school year, we will go ahead and do that. If the response is to pay additional money to restore it to battery function, I'll tell them in colorful terms where they can shove it.
posted by Sublimity at 5:48 AM on August 10, 2023