I’ve always been a faithful Dell customer. I’ve never, ever had a problem that Dell Support couldn’t fix; in fact, in college, I once sent my laptop in for depot service and got it back the next day. If that doesn’t make for an impressive and accurate customer service and a model to emulate, I’m not entirely certain what does.

So, of course, when it was time to upgrade my laptop again, it was a fairly obvious choice for me: Dell was automatically in the running. I ended up choosing a Dell XPS M1330, which I got for Christmas in 2007. The laptop worked incredibly well for several months — long enough that I was fairly convinced that I had made another good selection. In April of 2008, however, I started experiencing issues with the laptop’s power — the battery would take an abnormally long time to charge, losing a full charge faster than it would charge to begin with, abruptly slowing down significantly on random occasions when it was plugged into the wall, and spontaneously shutting down randomly. I, of course, opened a ticket with Dell fairly quickly when I identified this as a systemic problem — taking over 6 hours to charge from around 10% battery charge to a full charge seemed bad, somehow.

Little did I know what I was walking in to at the time.

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