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"worked great until warranty ran out"
2.0 starson by rubydoobydooPros: battery life pretty good, case held up
Cons: hot (even w/ new battery), wireless and ethernet crapped out, hard drive iffy
Summary: I bought a 600m in March 2004 - it worked great for a year and a month (my school purchased only the 1 year warranty). Since then the system slowly failed to recognize that a network cable was plugged in, then failed to recognize the ethernet adapter, then failed to recognize the wireless adapter. I tried replacing the wireless card - didn't help. For the last year, I've had to use USB adapters to connect to a network. Bulky and easily broken, especially when I am trying to transport the computer from my office to my classroom. The battery, hard drive, and palm rest all get excessively hot. The machine rarely shuts down without freezing and often refuses to display useful icons in the task bar, like the volume icon (oddly, kodak comes up all the time). The hard drive has crashed on me a few times, though I've been able to recover by removing it and putting it back in - don't know what that's about. I know this one's now verging on obsolescence, but I expected more life out of it, given my past experiences with Dells. I think their quality is going downhill.
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Our company buys Dell laptops to us.A colleague and I have exact same 600m which were bought within about a month (november, december 2004).<br><br>First, within few month both laptops left corner was chipped off exact same way, same location, very cheap plastic casing...<br><br>Second, we both observed that due to some uneven heating on the backside of the display, bottom portion of the display close to right hinge would become darker over time. Whites would become dark gray.. Poor design causes excessive heat on portions of LCD, exact same way on both laptops.<br>Several months back, it started not to boot up. It would not even power up. I had to play with it, apply pressure to different parts of the case until it would start. It would make noises via its speakers while it did not start at all, would not even post.<br><br>Just like another user mentioned, my network card also started acting up. First it would not see the LAN. I thought it could be a connector issue, so I removed the minuature connector from cable and soldered it to the network card. It worked OK fo a while, but then it started o act again. In the meantime, wireles would also act up, though not as much as wired part. <br><br>My colleague's network card started acting up with the wireles part, but for the most part he does not have any problem with wired networking.<br><br>His computer also will not power up from time to time, he says he applies pressure on the back to get it boot.<br><br>For the last two weeks, my display background light started to turn off, or sometimes it will not turn on at all. I think my colleague will have this problem shortly. Since his laptop had been replicating mines problems.<br><br>These ar all indications of poor design and quality control. Although manufacturing seems to be quite repeatable. Otherwise, would it be possible to make systems that fail same way at around same times.<br>I'll push hard to convince my company not to buy dell anymore.<br><br>BTW. I am NOT "irfan_bugmenot ". I logged in via BUGMENOT <img border="0" src="http://www.cnet.com/i/mb/emoticons/wink.gif" alt=";)">. <br>Sagolasin Irfan
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