My Dell XPS laptop was finally fixed. It's been over a month but Dell finally sent a tech to repair it. I only had to get a little bitchy on the phone to get them to come fix it.
This morning a very nice tech showed up to fix it. He was about 10 minutes early so I had to rush out of the shower. I tossed on a bathrobe and put my hair in a towel, then pulled the Trillian dog, who was barking up a storm, out of the doorway. I dragged my laptop out for him to look at and before I knew it there were screws out all over the place, various parts of my laptop were on the coffee table next to him and the screen was disconnected from the body of the laptop. It was pretty simple for him to pull out the old video card and swap in a new one. Then he reassembled it all again. (There were no screws left over, I checked.) I powered it up and there were no more blue lines!!! YAY!! I didn't get to try running WoW, because all the servers were down, but things look good. Yay for laptop fixing!
Some interesting things about watching this process:
1) The laptop is basically a series of layers. The battery had to come out of the back first, they the upper part of the laptop shell, then keyboard, then the screen came off, then we could see the video card.
2) I was expecting a video card that was rectangular, but the heat sinks on this one were really cool looking. They were shiny copper and long and curvy and had vanes on the end that the fans pumped air through. It spanned most of the width of the laptop and looked pretty cool.
3) I need to check the Dell website to see if my battery needs to be recalled. While removing the laptop the tech mentioned how just last week he replaced a batter on this same model of laptop.
Anyway tonight I will play WoW on my laptop again. It will be much more comfortable than my desktop because I will get to sit on the bed next to Shari. And Trillian will be happy too, because she can lay on the bed on our feet. I like my desktop, but the temporary setup I have right now is just a little too far away for me to comfortably read the chat text so I'm feeling a little bit blind having to lean forward whenever anyone says anything.
