Holy Shit! Dell is replacing my refurb Latitude 131L with...

[Glocksman]

A tricked out Latitude D820!

Seriously.

Last week I emailed Dell tech support about the uneven backlighting on my refurbished 131L, and the support guy said that since I was still in the 21 day return period, they'd just ship me a new laptop instead of having a service call done.

So today I check my Dell account info to see if it'd shipped, and according to them, they're replacing my 131L (Turion TL-52 X2 processor, 80 GB hard drive, DVD RW, 1GB RAM, and an extra year of NBD warranty) with a D820 with a WUXGA display, Nvidia quadro 256 MB video, a Core Duo T2300E, 100 GB 7200 rpm hard drive, DVD RW, 2 GB RAM, and a 3 year warranty with complete care and gold support!

Either Dell was out of 131L's or someone has made a big mistake.

[phongn]

Sweet. Just smile & nod (though IIRC, Dell is pretty good about letting you keep that stuff)

[Arrow]

Reminds me of what happened a couple of years ago. Our PO person ordered a new machine, and got twenty 1700 laser printers to go with it, and some MP3 players, and Flash drives. Dell must have been pretty desperate to clean out the warehouse!

[Glocksman]

I hate to resurrect a thread, but an interesting development has happened.
The latitude was purchased to replace my Inspiron 9300 that developed a single vertical fuchsia line about a third of the way across the screen.
This happened about six months after my warranty expired.

It turns out that this is a common problem among Dell laptops of a certain age that use a particular LG Philips panel, and Dell even requests you use 'Dell vertical line outreach' in the subject header when emailing their 'customer advocate' about the problem.

I emailed him about the problem last month, and when I didn't hear back, I bought the new machine.
Earlier this week, after the return period for the new notebook expired, Dell offered to do a one time panel replacement on the 9300.

Needless to say, I took them up on the offer and had them send me the panel instead of sending in the laptop for service.
It came the very next day, and 20 minutes later I had the new screen installed and running.

Having a defect free screen enhanced the resale value of the old machine somewhat , so while I'm somewhat annoyed that the offer didn't come in time to return the new machine, I'm still getting $500 out of the 9300 and the fully loaded D820 only cost $878, so I can look at it as a major upgrade for under $400.