Customer covers Dell's failure

I purchased Dell xps L401x two years ago, in 2010. The laptop came with Nvidia optimus 420m. However, whenever I tried to load nvidia gpu, it went overheating in no more than 5 mins. The gpu just stopped working to protect itself from burnt. In these two years, I never used the nvidia graphics card.

Last week, I tried to do some internal cleaning and re-paste some high level thermal grease, as I heard these would help overheating problem. When I opened the heat sink, I was totally shocked. These is NO thermal grease on the nvidia clip. I attach the photo shot I took when I just removed the heat sink.

You can see that there are thermal grease on the intel cpu and the integrated gpu. Nvidia GPU is supper clean. Not a little grease on it. Originally, the GPU clip is directly attached to the heat sink. That is why the CPU went overheating so easily.

I re-pasted the CPU, added grease on GPU, then turned it back on. Problem solved. No more overheating. I loaded games, GPU computing. The temperature never went above 60C with GPU 100% loaded.

Dell sells defective products and lets customer fix it.