After literally 45 days of waiting, I finally have a working laptop again. If you haven’t been keeping up with the story, a tl;dr version is basically that I sent my laptop in to Dell to get it fixed, they gave 45 days’ worth of random excuses as to why they weren’t able to fix it yet, then finally decided to just ship me a new laptop.

The model I got is the Inspiron 17R SE 7720.

It has some pretty decent upgrades from the previous one I had, namely, an Intel Core i7-3630QM @ 2.40 GHz processor (an upgrade from an i5 processor), 8 GB of memory (an upgrade from 6 GB), an Intel Integrated HD Graphics 4000 card (an upgrade from 3000), and a second NVIDIA graphics processor (that the previous laptop did not have). The hard drive was also upgraded, but the nice part is that this laptop has the capacity to hold two hard drives, so I was able to just stick my old hard drive into this new laptop and basically have 1 TB more extra space than I did before.

So far the only thing I’m dissatisfied with is the keyboard. I strongly prefer keyboards without spaces in between the keys, but the keys are all spaced out on this laptop.

These are probably literally the biggest grapes I’ve ever seen in my life.

A while back, my university had its first home football game. The day before, in preparation, a lot of areas were either shut down or reserved so the sports crew could come in and set up their equipment.

A “No Parking” sign was posted on a street near the football stadium – this happened to be the street across from the lot where I normally park, so I had a clear view of it when I arrived.

While I was getting ready to pack everything up so I can head out to the bus stop to ride to the main campus, a car pulled up on the street.

No parking sign? It’s clearly just an illusion.

Today’s the day you’ve all been waiting for. … Or at least, I’ve been waiting for. October 11 is the deadline I set for Dell to finish fixing up my laptop and send me a confirmation email with a tracking number letting me know my laptop has been sent back to me.

I got a voicemail from Dell a few days ago that they are unable to repair my laptop (I’m guessing due to another ridiculous reason with an easy and straightforward solution, but they didn’t specify). However, because they would like to honor the deadline I set for them (or because they’re terrified for their company’s reputation), they concluded that they would like to send me a replacement laptop.

I received a follow-up call yesterday, which I was able to answer. The customer support technician stated that he just wanted to verify that this would be okay with me, and informed me that, although they were not sure which laptop would be sent to me, it would be a laptop of equal or greater quality. He also mentioned that it would take about seven days for the laptop to go through the approval process from the management.

So here’s where I stand today.

I specifically told the technician that he had until today, October 11, 2013, to email me with a shipping confirmation. I informed him this eight days prior to the deadline I set.

Although I acknowledge that he did eventually come to somewhat of a resolution before the deadline, I still do not have the shipping confirmation in my email (and most likely will not, because he said it would take a week for it to be ready). If this was the solution they wanted to approach, they could have acted quicker (possibly deciding to do a laptop exchange the day I set the deadline), and still had a day to spare to ship out my laptop.

As a result, the deadline was not met. I will keep my side of the condition, which is to publish this entire problem as a complete and coherent story, and to publicize the poor service I received from Dell.

I will start working on writing this story once I receive my exchange laptop, so I have a specific number of how many days the entire repair process took. This will be released on my website, as well as (likely) in the form of a YouTube video.

There will then be a condensed version of this story written, to be posted on popular purchase and review websites like Amazon, and even on Dell’s own website. If the review site allows me to include hyperlinks, I will link to the full version of the story on my website.

I assume that hearing the tidbits of my story so far has convinced you that Dell’s repair service is pretty bad, and hopefully hearing the full story to be released soon will persuade you never to do business with Dell. I also hope that Dell will realize that in the age of social media, they will never again lie to their customers and make them wait over a month to get a laptop fixed, or else their reputation will be shattered to pieces.

At the end of last month, I mentioned that I spent my first full week at my new university. Being at a new university also means having a new study spot – I snapped this photo out the window behind me.

A bit of construction going on, but still a nice view.

If you can’t tell from the photo, that’s former United States president George Bush looking through binoculars without removing the lens caps – I came across this in a book that I was reading a while back.