Checking Dell warranty information

February16

Dell.com has a great feature allowing you to check the warranty information on a dell product by using its service code.

If you have a system with a lot of dell computers, you can do is store all of the service tag codes and put them on a web page with an easy click-able link to see the warranty information. With some more work you can integrate it into a content managements system where a user could enter new service tags, disable tags that are no longer valid, and the tag links were automatically generated, etc.

Lets go with a simple example, of setting up a single static link. First setup a php file as follows named dell-warranty.php:

<?php

$code = $_GET['code'];

echo "<html>";

echo "<body ";

// validate code

if ( $code != "" )

{

echo "onload=\"document.getElementById('submitForm').submit()\"";

}

echo ">";

echo "<form id=\"submitForm\" name=\"frmServiceTagSelect\" method=\"post\" ";

echo "action=\"http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/details?c=us&l=en&s=gen\">";

echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"logout\" value=\"\">";

echo "Service Tag: ";

echo "<input name=\"ServiceTag\" type=\"text\" id=\"ServiceTag\" maxlength=\"7\" size=\"30\" value=\"".$code."\"/>";

echo "<input type=\"submit\">";

echo "</form>";

echo "</body>";

echo "</html>";

Then create a web page that has a link to the dell-warranty.php page and passes the service tag as an argument to the page. ie: <a href="dell-warranty.php?code=9999999">9999999</a>. When some one clicks a link on your web page it will automatically forward them to the dell website.

Below is a recreation of the form, enter your dell service code and click the check warranty button.

Sample Dell warranty form

posted under Random

3 Comments to

“Checking Dell warranty information”

On January 28th, 2010 at 1:52 am Commenter Says:
Not a very useful script, something more useful would be reading a db where svc tags are stored or even a flat file and then retrieving info about the service tags and storing this info into the db. then you can display this right on your page along with other info you may need… once the data is stored in the DB you can display it correctly by doing database statements to calculate the DATE remaining correctly.
On February 9th, 2010 at 11:03 pm kp Says:
Commenter above is dumb. Why would you want to take data Dell already has stored in a DB and duplicate in in yours when you can just borrow theirs on the fly. What happens if they make a change on their end and your DB doesn’t update their information. You are then relying on old, inaccurate data. The idea implemented here works just fine.

It would be best to be able to pull information using something like SOAP and php, but I’m not finding anything on Dell having a SOAP server.
On May 13th, 2010 at 10:22 am Macgyver Says:
Commenter is not dumb. There’s a good valid reason for duplicating the data you retrieve from Dell. First, I don’t believe they have an official API or SOAP service for retrieving warranty info. Second, the current way I’ve seen people extract warranty info is actually do an HTTP/HTML pull and extract/parse the data that way. This way sucks, but it’s all that we have right now. Additionally, doing it this way is REALLY SLOW sometimes. If you had your own DB with this data in it too, it would be very fast displaying a web page with lots of computers’ warranty info compared to contacting Dell’s web site individually for each one!