Dropped: Dell Inspiron 1525

[Raye]

Hi, I dropped (or rather my kitten knocked to the floor) my Dell Inspiron 1525. I had just keyed in the password and logged in and it was sent toppling about 2ft onto a hard wood floor. The machine was fine until I thought "I'll reboot it" and then it just rebooted and blue-screened, coming up with the error 0X000000f4. I brought it into work and a really kind guy in our IT department checked it over, made sure that the memory hadn't come loose or the HDD cables dislodged, he also checked that the hdd could be found, it was, though faults have since been discovered. At his suggestion I attempted to reinstall after he transferred as many files as possible onto my work pc (shhhhh) but many couldn't because of a circular (?) error on the files. When I attempted to reinstall Windows Vista (stop with the hissing, I know!) I got this error when the system blue screened, immediately before it rebooted: 0x000000F4: CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION Is this just a case of the hard drive needs replacing? The camera flashes when I boot up, the system gets to a certain point (normally the password screen, where ironically it was when the machine tumbled to the floor) and then reboots again. My insurance company want £125 just to LOOK at the machine, but Dell want just £70 to provide me with a new HDD... Help?

[Robbo]

Get a quote from a computer repairer to totally put the computer back together and rebuild, it will come to a lot more than £70


One of my kids broke my laptop a few years back (knocked it onto floor), the repair costs made it uneconomical to repair and the insurance allowed me to put the repair costs towards a new one instead. I think it ended up costing me about 75 quid in the end, for a brand new lappy.

[Raye]

I have had it looked at and it appears that it is only the HDD, the fact that it still switches on and goes through the motions and the only thing that is damaged is the HDD...to even get it looked at the insurers are asking for £125...they are only talking 'repair' not replacement.

[lambo]

what size hd are dell offering you for £70, you would get one ebay fairly cheap.