Resurrecting Dell’s 3-year warranty from the dead
Personal finance
Our 2001FP LCD screen started dying earlier this week when a 1.5″ blue band of vertical stripes started appearing on the right side of the screen after the monitor had been on for a while. I hadn’t noticed this happening before, but after refreshing the desktop, closing applications, and restarting the computer all to no avail, I feared for the worst.
A series of searches for variations on the keywords “2001fp vertical stripe problem” on Google eventually landed me on a Boing Boing Gadgets blog post written just earlier this month that described a vertical stripe display problem with a Dell 2001fp that was as close to the problem that I was experiencing as I could find. Happily, I scrolled down to look through the comments on suggestions for how to fix this, only to find a comment from someone who sounded like he did LCD repairs for a living that explained that the issue was not likely something I could fix and was probably due to an overheating graphics board :(
After re-reading the post and comments, I noticed that the blogger also said that Dell had read his entry and contacted him, suggesting that his monitor might still be covered under its 3-year warranty. Luckily, my hubby is an organized person who saves containers and original boxes, and we still had our packing slip from the original box that the 2001fp came in. Keeping expectations low, I called up Dell and explained the situation.
