About six months back I bought a dell Inspiron 9400 laptop with 17″ Wide-Aspect screen with the resolution 1920×1200, 2GB Ram, 2GHz Core Duo Processor with complete cover for one year. I felt the power of it and was very happy.

Not even a month had passed, suddenly the display failed.
I was given two options

  1. Get a replacement for the entire machine, but have to wait for a week
  2. Get the LCD display replaced with in two days

I took option 2 because I can’t wait for a week and did not want to re-install all over again. Then every thing back to normal

Later I started hearing about Core 2 Duo and its benefits against my Core Duo

I felt sick again, I should have waited little longer 🙁

I was upset because It will take a very long time to get another chance to change my machine.

But like all my deepest desires, this also CAME TRUE. Yes I’m writing this using my Core 2 Duo machine 🙂

Here is how it happened

  • Last month display started to give another kind of problem, flickering lines running across specific color regions
  • I captured those hardware generated flickers using my Nokia 6670 (I have another story to share about my mobile, later) and emailed the video to dell customer care
  • Even though they suggested to get it serviced, I wanted to replace the machine this time. Also I wanted to change the processor to  Core 2 Duo and get a better graphics card
  • Customer care guy told me that Refund may be possible but I may loose 20 to 40% of money in the process. I stood by my point and asked him to find out what is the exact amount I would loose
  • After talking to different people in dell for three days, finally they came up with a very positive answer. Since the machine has a defect they can refund all the money back. Which means I used a core duo machine for six months for free, and I got another chance to choose what I want in my machine
  • I bought new Inspiron 9400 with Core 2 Duo, with 100 GB HDD, XP media center edition with a TV tuner. Copied everything from the old machine. Then I returned the old machine
  • Last week I en-cashed the cheque given by dell

Luckily I need not go this crazy to get my Core 2 Duo 😉