Juddium

I've noticed my screen is marred now corresponding to the bottom of the keyboard, where a lot of dead skin cells seem to collect for me (as well as on some of the keys, which have also marred the screen). Not sure if anyone has heard of buffing the screen to get that out, I'd be curious; either way, be sure and clean it up as quickly as possible. I've used the screen wipes on my entire laptop (M14x R1) without any ill effect, the kind that has the alcohol in it, so if nothing else you can give that a try.

I've got an M14x r1 that I broke the plastic part of the usb port on. It's the left-side port, the 2.0 power-thru port. Having only 2 ports is a pain, and one of my external HDD is acting weird now (disconnecting/reconnecting) on the other ports. I'm pretty confident with a soldering iron, I'm just curious - has anyone ever actually tried to remove and insert a new USB port before? I tore the computer down once to see if I could glue the plastic back in, but (unsurprisingly) it didn't work, and I'm tempted to tear it down and at least remove the port if I can't find a replacement. I didn't look too hard at what removing the port looked like, if it's even possible - anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

This might be a super-dumb question, but it isn't overheating is it? I've seen enough laptops behave exactly that way due to heat that it's always my first reaction - I assume not with your experience, but I've been flabbergasted by dumb solutions before and thought I'd at least throw it out there. Also I've seen funky behavior from the video cable not being seated properly on laptops before, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that the new screen from eBay is faulty as well.

FWIW I broke one or two of those little plastic retainers for ribbon cables (little buggers); I just super-glued the piece back together and used it again. I know it's far from recommended practice, but it isn't absolutely essential to have that particular plastic device - as long as contact is made with the pins, you could use just about anything to hold it in place. Glue from a hot glue gun works as an insulator, and can be removed fairly easily - I dabbed some on the pins from the microUSB port to the PCB of my Nexus 7 after resoldering one of them back on, and it's held up wonderfully since then. I'm sure there are better solutions out there, but getting it to work again is more important than aesthetics IMO.

I had so many crashes I gave up and downgraded back to Windows 7. It was never the same issue; surprisingly I could run longer if I booted up a game and played, but inevitably it would crash. By the end I couldn't last longer than 15 minutes, even in safe mode - I couldn't even update the drivers or analyze the minidump. I figure I'll wait a few more months for driver issues to get sorted out more before I try again. Did you come from 8.1 or from 7? I assume coming from 8.1 is a smoother transition than from 7.

I've been using a Samsung 840 Evo 1T drive for the last year and change in my M14xR1. I only just recently discovered that I'm not getting the full SATA 3 speeds (in my haste to replace the drive I didn't do much research beyond "will it work"), but so far it's been a much better solution than the HDD that it came with. I would certainly recommend it, and I'd imagine the 850 Pro would work just as well as my 840. Incidentally, the original HDD failed after about 2 months when I purchased the laptop in 2012, and the replacement HDD looked ready to die before I moved overseas last year. Not sure if the original HDD drives Dell chooses are just poor quality or if I just manage to abuse more computer more than anticipated (probably the latter).