The main comment on Dell notebook (Inspiron 6000) in a nutshell is that the product is not very good, but Dell customer service is to some extend good. I will strongly recommend Dell notebook for people who want to use his/her notebook as an entertainment product. The product is not so robust in nature. Overall look and feel of the Dell Notebook is very good and attractive. As a product I will give 5 out of 10 and for Dell customer service I will give 8 out of 10.
Who Will Buy Dell Notebook (Inspiron 6000): If you want to watch movie, surf net and do little office work with few simple softwares, this product is ideal for you. The cost of this product is very good and competitive enough with any other same kind of products available in market. I guess Dell Notebooks are most cost effective product currently available in market.
Who Should Not Buy Dell Notebook (Inspiron 6000): The professionals, who want to use the product extensively for office work or software development work, should not buy this product. I saw if we run few applications like .NET etc. the notebook is not efficient enough.
Few Things I Observed In This Notebook (Inspiron 6000):
Dell Notebook (Inspiron 6000): Product Color – The notebook comes in mix of silver and white colors and keyboards in black. Personally I feel we could have made much better color combination for this model. Both the colors (White and Silver) come under light-color, which doesn’t look very attractive.
Dell Notebook (Inspiron 6000): Mother Board – Dell mother board is not very good. I faced few hardware problems which I think can be addressed to mother board.
Dell Notebook (Inspiron 6000): All Other Internal Parts – I would say the internal parts are not too good for this model of Dell notebook (Inspiron 6000). I am especially worried about hard disk and battery supplied with model. For me I had to change the hard drive and battery within 10 months of purchase.
My Own Experience with Dell Notebook (Inspiron 6000):
I bought this Dell notebook (model: Inspiron 6000) on December 2005 with Windows Media Center edition. On August 2006, the notebook started producing three high pitch beep sounds during booting the notebook. I called Dell customer service. One Dell technical representative from India helped me over phone to resolve the problem. She took almost four hours to identify the reason of that noise coming out from notebook while booting. She was able to conclude that this was all because of the hard drive, but were not sure why it is happening. She suggested me to ship the notebook to Dell lab and they will test the hard drive. They sent me a box with all necessary shipping labels. I would appreciate the help I received from the customer service and the shipment process. The shipment was DHL next day delivery which was really good and on time. I shipped whole computer to Dell lab and got several phone calls from Dell representatives about the status of my notebook. I received my computer back to me as untouched, but with a new hard drive and installation CDs and few instructions.
I installed whole operating systems, drivers, utilities and applications to my new supplied hard drive and shipped that defective hard drive back to Dell. Now, this is the point where all my other problems caused. I will explain them in following paragraphs. I expected that they will install the OS also, but they told that I have an agreement for one year hardware warranty, so won’t be doing anything with software.
Again in September 2006, I called Dell for my battery. The battery was keeping the charge for less than 30 minutes (sometimes less than 10 minutes). Dell representative took little time to understand the problem and decided to replace the battery. As I was in one year parts warranty, Dell replaced everything what went wrong with my computer.
In February 2007, I eventually tried to play a DVD in my notebook, but failed as I didn’t have any DVD decoder installed. I was trying to recap that I used to see DVD in my notebook earlier, but suddenly what happened so that computer is saying that my DVD decoder is not installed. Then I recall the fact that after I changed my hard drive I didn’t run any DVD in my system and when Dell sent me the CDs for all required software they missed to send me the DVD decoder software. To play any DVD to your system you need the software which is called DVD decoder which is not free. When you purchase any DVD ROM, DVD decoder comes as a package. You pay for both, because this is something you need both of them together to play a DVD. I called Dell customer knowing the fact that my warranty got expired on December 2006. I tried to make them understand my problem. They took little time to decide whether they can send me the decoder software in free of any charge. They convinced and agreed to send me the software CD, but not any further service what I may require during installation. I also agreed on that because I was quite confident about the problem. I received the CD with two days and installed the software. My notebook is doing great with DVD now. I again want to appreciate the customer service I received in this case, which is simply world-class.
Now, very recently I am facing another problem with my TV tuner. When I installed OS and all other softwares in my new hard disk, I missed to installed TV tuner driver. Now when trying to installed TV tuner driver, I am getting a serious error from operating system, which simply beyond my knowledge and Media center TV also not functioning with an error message that my TV tuner hardware is not functioning properly. Need to again call Dell customer service and find out what’s going wrong. My journey with Dell will never stop.
This Is What My Specification Was (Inspiron 6000):
