Inspiron 6400 e1505 Dud

For what it's worth, Dell have now responded to the problem pretty well. My initial frustration with the support guy was that he wouldn't believe that it was a hardware fault, and got me to do a chkdsk in order to try fix.. the cpu.. hmm. Anyway, he must have talked to a supervisor, they rang back and they are sending around a tech with replacement parts tomorrow, so that does help. I'm still unhappy about the lack of internal microhpone, the one on the 8600 was fantastic, you could just open the laptop and talk on skype like a speakerphone, so that was my intention for this one. Theres really no option apart from opening the thing and fitting a mic insert into it.. which would undoubtedly void the warranty, which turns out to be pretty darn important. The bluetooth headset approach is probably the best subsbreastute, perhaps even if my phone supports it, i can use the phone's speakerphone capability as a pc mic-speaker replacement. Dunno. Thanks for the input, I am still a bit peeved, but mostly looking forward to having a dual core notebook working again. Regarding laptop recommendations, I couldn't start that in this group.. it's a dell group and i can just see a flame war emerging if I dare recommend anything else :). Dont get me wrong, I have always liked Dell in the past, otherwise I wouldn't have forked over the big ones for my 6400. For someone who had inbuilt mic as a key criteria tho, obviously couldn't recommend any of the new dells, but I wish they would revisit this decision. More and more people are using skype or similar, and everyone I know who finds out they can just talk to their laptop is like 'wow.. that's great!' Seems an odd thing to scrap too. Even if it were optional, I would pay the extra whatever to get one.