I recently received a few emails from Craig, who managed to get Dell to repair his dead XPS M1210 free of charge.

This is one awesome little machine. It ran well until last week. Then it blinked off. Ironically, it sat for two days and wouldn't boot, the power test indicating the video card being the culprit. But on day three it booted up and ran without a glitch. Then yesterday, it died again. That's when I saw the article you had contributed to.

Accordingly, I bit the bullet and contacted Dell, held my ground for almost an hour, to avoid the up front troubleshooting charge. I was sympathetic with the support agent who sounded so exasperated because he didn't have a clue what the GPU glitch was. He got so frustrated playing the gopher intermediary between me and his own staff, he finally put me through the extended warranty group. Now ACT II.

The $199 test charge and $399 repair I finally negotiated down to a flat $391 with tax. And being that I'd will have a warranted unit afterwards, I'm pleased. As an afterthought, If I hadn't jumped the gun, I could have just reinstated the lapsed warranty, and then called technical support.

...

CANCEL that last email to you.

I tried one more time and reached XPS Tech Support. I found a list of case numbers online that had success getting their M1210s included in the recall. I referenced one of the case numbers to them.

Dell said that my machine is so far out of warranty that even if they extended the warranty one year it would still be out of warranty and not covered. Nevertheless, they agreed to repair it free of charge.

I have posted a list of case numbers here that includes the numbers mentioned by Craig, as well as my own case number and those of people who have emailed me. Each case number represents an XPS that was repaired for free outside of the warranty period. It's definitely worth following Craig's example and quoting those case numbers when requesting repair of your XPS M1210.