Take a look at this about Nvidia graphics cards, its not good if you have one.
 

I`m not sure if someone has posted a link to this story before so i appologise if its already been discussed, its not good if you have one of these certain types of Nvidia graphics cards as it sounds like they are a ticking time bomb waiting to fail. I have a sony with the 8600GT Graphics card :eek:

A whole thread on it including the models of graphics cards affected, it seems mainly to affect Dell, HP and Sony equipment.

Defective Nvidia chipsets in your current Vaio? - Notebook Forums and Laptop Discussion

One of the stories about it

All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad - The INQUIRER

I'm glad I paid for an extended warranty on my Dell, and on top of that Dell appear to be adding an extra 12 months on for this specific issue, I'm covered until early 2012, thank goodness

Im currently trying to extend the warranty on my Dell Vostro too, as I chose the Nvidia version, wish I hadnt now

Looks like my decision to push the boat out and get the 8800GTX was a good idea!

Bu66er, i've got an 8600m GT in my Inspiron 1720. Had it since January so how long are they expecting the cards to last before they fail? Will be contacting Dell next week now.

Their not saying it will fail, just that they've had a higher than usual failure rate. Mind you, as they don't probably say what the usual rate is and how much higher it is, it's possible they're all sh1te, but I doubt it. My prvious experiences of these sorts of situations has been a particular model of hard disk, which ended up with about a 90% failure rate in the first year, and cd drives where the tray wouldn't open if it wasn't used enough, and that was well over 50% as well. It sucks, I just hope it's at the lower end of the scale of failure rates.

Well according to Dell my Inspiron 1720 with 8600m GT card is not affected

NVIDIA GPU Update: Limited Warranty Enhancement Details - Direct2Dell

I even went on the Dell support chat line and the bloke was a waste of time, they knew nothing of it and denied any knowledge of it even when I gave them links. Then when I posted the above link they said my system was not listed so not affected even though it has one of the affected video cards.

I have always recommended Dell but after this I will not be doing so again and wont be purchasing any more hardware from them.

Anyone know of Dell in the UK that I can write/email to so don't have to deal with the Indian call centre lot who know foof all?

I can imagine how hard it was to get any sense out of Dell india ltd, my only dealings with them was to try and buy a D-Link wireless mini USB adapter which is the one below.

Dell : DLink Systems D-Link DWA-140 Wireless N USB Mini Adapter : Computer Components : Home & Home Office

Very easy you would think, it must have took about 5 attempts to try and get someone to understand what i wanted, i even gave them the D-Link part number which is on their own web page but it was still very hard work because they have foriegn speaking call centres ansd this one was indian.

My 8400gs already failed on me due to this.

You'll know it when it comes:

1st stage: Windows Crash, might recover itself with a VGA driver error.
It did this 4 times to me over 1 day.

*call dell after the 2nd crash and sort out getting it changed as it's about to get a lot worse*

2nd Stage:
Graphic corruption in windows leading to crash.

3rd Stage:Graphic corruption buring boot up, crash.

4th Stage: Lines everywhere no boot up.

This happened over about 2 days for me.

I have 4 Years warranty anyway + the extra 12 months graphics cover though so all is well :D

As it's dell it was sorted next day no fuss :)

If you don't play games or push the graphics very hard (external monitors etc..) it might never happen..