Sell video card upgrades for older laptops
Service and Support, Laptops submitted by shiningarcanine
05/02/07
In 2001, I purchased a Dell Inspiron 4000 and three years later, I wanted to upgrade its graphics card, but it was not possible to upgrade it. Eventually, I purchased a 16MB graphics card off ebay, which Dell used in some Inspiron 4000 laptops, but it apparently did not upgrade mine due to the motherboard revision.
Now I have a Dell Inspiron E1705 and it has a GeForce 7 Go 7900 GS graphics card. I am not going to buy a new laptop for years, but I would still like to upgrade it as Nvidia comes out with newer mobile graphics solutions, such as the GeForce 8 Go 8800 GS or if I do not upgrade it to Windows Vista, the GeForce 7 Go 7900 GTX when I find the GeForce 7 Go 7900 GS to no longer deliver satisfactory frame rates.
Many enthusiasts who own Dell laptops feel the same way. Dell has probably lost many of them as customers because of this. The only reason I brought a new Dell laptop was because I liked the hardware build quality, but if I do not feel like Dell cares about me and it certainly feels like Dell does not (e.g. all of the junk they load onto their PCs, the recovery partition replacing the Windows and Office CDs, the lack of Dell supported upgrade-ability, etcetera), I might not buy a Dell when I buy another laptop.
Offering hardware upgrades will go a long way in rectifying that, as if I and other enthusiasts perceive that Dell's laptops will be upgradeable in the future, we will buy more of them and then come back as returning customers when we buy new ones. This might change the purchase intervals for a small portion of Dell's customers, but if Dell does this, Dell would have many more customers and many more returning customers as a result.
