Dell Check Order Status...Your Thoughts... (1 Viewer)

[Gregg Loewen]

I ordered my 8200 (thanks to all of you) on May 1st and was told to check the Check Order Status page regularly to see its construction process.

Its been in testing for 3 days now, is this normal? Im figuring that the COS page is just an advertising gimmick, trying to keep over anxious buyers pacified. Does anybody else have an opinion?

"Dude Im getting a Dell!!"

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Yes it's normal. The companies build to order and they do

generaly spend 3-5 days letting machines burn in at the factory before they ship.

 

[Shayne Lebrun]

Mechanical components, such as hard drives, tend to fail either within a few hours of usage, or after several years. This is the 'bathtub' curve of failure rates over time. Also, some flaws with the electrical components will only show up after a few hours of heavy use. So it's common to 'burn in' a computer by running it heavily for a few days; there are programs that will drive the hard drives, put complex thingies on the screen, crunch math, and write patterns to RAM over and over again, looking for problems.

Dell does this for you, because it's cheaper for them to find a defective bit and fix it there, than for you to find it, call tech support, quibble for a few days, and have a part and tech shipped out.

 

[DaveF]

As others Brett and Shayne said, this is Good Thing. Really, it's a sign of Dell's strong service that they give a full three days to testing and burn-in (and have been for many years). It used to be that this was not as commonplace. They are trying to find hardware problems so you don't have to.