Generally speaking, one of my most depended-on pieces of technology is my Dell XPS M1330 laptop. I’ve had it since January 2008, and while it’s been reasonably good – where “reasonably” is subject to whether I’m talking about the computer itself (not bad), Windows Vista (awful), or the motherboard which was replaced under warranty last year (nice one, Dell).

While my laptop itself doesn’t do any heavy duty computing tasks – not since I dumped Outlook earlier this year, anyway – it does travel everywhere with me, spending time on around a dozen WiFi networks regularly, and a smattering of 3G broadband connections in Australia, Europe and Asia.

But I was talking to a fellow XPS owner earlier this week about the problems he’s had with his M1330, and how the motherboard has had to be replaced several times because of overheating; clearly, I was lining myself up for a fall because 5 minutes after (fortunately) a big presentation on Wednesday afternoon my video screen turned, quite literally, to vertically-lined mush.

I spent much of Wednesday evening trying to get it to a state where it could do a clean reboot, after which it would work perfectly for around 5 minutes or longer before it would randomly scramble the video display and then freeze.

So flying back to Australia this morning, I decided to drag my jet-lagged body into the office to say Hi to the team and pick up snail-mail, when I tried to boot the laptop again on the office network – just long enough to make a quick backup before the same symptoms appeared again. So I called Dell, who, on asking me to quote my service tag politely informed me that my XPS was out of warranty – then proceeded to ask me to run a diagnostic test: holding down the “D” key while powering the laptop on. This displayed a sequence of coloured screens and, on hearing the diagnostic results, the support person informed that this was a video problem and therefore had an “extended” warranty for an extra year – happy news.  So I was given a case ID and informed a Dell technician would contact me on Monday to arrange a swap-out.

In the meantime, I’m trying to work on an old G4 iBook that I had at home – I used to love this Mac, now it’s barely fast enough to run Firefox.

I’d like to congratulate Dell at this point on their customer care, however I suspect that their “extension” of the warranty is really only a result of endemic failures of their XPS laptops. Which is a shame because, on balance, they aren’t a bad business computer.