Hardware Issues

Must be the weather I keep telling myself. Seems the heat may be getting to more things than just me. I have a Dell Precision M4300 which for the last few months makes this very strange sound - sometimes 3 times a day, other days silent. My team mates find it rather amusing as it always makes a noise at the wrong moment.

This is not the only time I have had issues with Dell Laptops, I have had 5 or so in the last few years at work, and all have had similar "strange noises" coming from beneath the bonnet. My most reliable Dell purchase was some 6 years ago when I was contracting - at the time my Dell Inspiron 5100 was expensive at just over £1k but I beefed up the graphics and to this day still performs fantastic as a home pc after upgrading to 1GB RAM.

I wonder whether Dell - as many other companies do - when they expand so much, the quality disappears. My new M4300 is less than a year old but already looks tired - the brushed chrome on the cover looks a right mess - looked great when new however.

Now I see my Blackberry also has given up the ghost - intermittently hard rebooting itself with no warning, due to be replaced next few days so lets see if the new one lasts longer than 9 months!

Maybe we are pushing the boundaries of technology now, everything has to be "NOW", real-time, at-hand, in a compact design. This along with competition for companies and individuals budgets seems that cost cutting is showing, so I guess the hot weather is not really the problem here, its; the fact that we should not always insist that cheaper is better :)