Raymond Camden's Blog Rss

One of Those Days - and Another Dell Horror Story

12

Posted in Misc | Posted on 08-05-2005 | 1,633 views

Today has just been horrible. Absolutely freaking horrible. In general, I love Dell. I've spent maybe 10k there in the last few years. In general, everything runs fine. About a year ago I bought a XPS laptop. A gamers laptop. This laptop was awesome. It was even better than my desktop (until I upgraded two months ago). The only thing lacking a bit was the battery. If I had known then what I knew now - I'd have bought another system. It's not that the system is bad, I just don't play as many PC games as I used too. That being said - I would have gone lighter with a longer battery life.

Anyway - the system would last about an hour and a half on battery, which isn't terrible for a powerhouse like that. Over the last two months or so, the battery has slowly degraded. It stopped charging to a hundred percent, and only gave me about 50 minutes on battery. For the heck of it, I decided to see if I could upgrade the battery. Turns out, they did have a newer battery with more power. I called Dell to confirm it would work on my XPS. (I'm a bit of a hardware dummy.) He not only confirmed that it would work, he said I would get 8 hours of battery life. Yes.... 8 hours. I suppressed snicker and told him that he was simply wrong, but that I'd be happy with a quarter of that.

The battery came in yesterday. I let it charge - and viola - no improvement. In fact, it seems to have almost the exact same duration.

So - after dropping close to two hundred bucks I'm a bit miffed. I called Dell this morning. I explained the situation to the support rep. I was put on hold. After 5 minutes I heard a beep and I was transferred. This is where Hell began.

For the next two hours, I was transferred four times. Each time I was sent to the wrong queue. At the last mistransfer, I demanded a manager. The manager said they even they can't bypass the hold lines, but that he would wait with me on hold. After 20 more minutes, he apolgized and said that the wait times must be extra long today. He took down my number and promised he would call me.

How many of my readers think I'll actually get a call?

If I wasn't so happy with my dual-core system, I'd return it. As it stands, I can't return my laptop (as far as I know). The thing is - I've spent a lot of money with Dell. In fact, my company only buys Dell. Of course, that may change now...

Comments

[Add Comment] [Subscribe to Comments]

Damien said on 08-05-2005 at 12:56 PM #
Personally I push for either HP e-PCs (all-in-one systems) or probably home-brew Athlon64 or Opteron systems (using the new nForce Professional chipsets). The e-PCs are great for e.g. customer service people who don't need anything beyond the basics, and Athlon64 systems make great workhorses. Then again I'm a geek and can juggle hardware as needed.
Simon Horwith said on 08-05-2005 at 1:01 PM #
Funny - I've had a similar experience. I've always loved Dell and my last laptop was an Inspiron 8500 - it was super slick at the time that I bought it. Not too long ago, my Dell stopped recognizing one of my RAM chips and was having all sorts of boot issues and lue screens of death. I had a 24 hour response international service contract with Dell for the laptop and this was the first time I'd called them from anywhere but the UK. The US support people couldn't confirm my service # because it was from the UK - which I thought was crazy. I wasn't even transferred to the UK office - they made me call them myself. After doing that I spent 20 minutes on the phone with them - no help at all and they then transfered me to India. India, believe it or not, was the only support office that was friendly or helpful, though they also couldn't fix the problem on the phone... but they did give me ammunition to use when calling Dell US again. Dell US the second time around was also no help, and get this - my international support contract wouldn't be honored until I waited 5 days for it to be transfered to the US, then they'd send someone. Some 24 hour support contract, huh? My company always buys Dells, and I kindly explained to them that I needed immediate satisfaction or I'd not only see to it that we never bought another Dell, but also that I'd be presenting in front of a lot of people using another laptop and would badmouth Dell while I presented (my laptop crash was 2 days before CFUnited). They were no help and I now hate Dell. I managed to fix the problem myself (it was actually only a 2 minute fix that they should have thought of over the phone) and presented with that laptop at CFUnited. After the conference I decided my laptop was ready for retirement, and you bet your ass I went out and bought a nice new Toshiba. My first of many non-dell laptpos and desktops to come. Dell machines are prety nice, but their support absolutely sucks, and there definitely are other nice laptops out there. I sympathise with you, Ray.
Kevin Aebig said on 08-05-2005 at 1:10 PM #
I bought a Inspiron 6000D about 5 months ago and though it's been good to me so far, I can understand your frustration.

I think the next laptop I get will probably be from IBM. They cost more, but they last forever... especially the military grade ones with titanium cases. =]

Cheers,

Kevin
HPluvsMe said on 08-05-2005 at 3:13 PM #
I thought all you guys were ubergeeks. You should all now officially recognize, and tell your employers, friends, and familymembers...Dell is the new Packard Bell.

They have been crap since about 2002, and when I saw that damn fake windows shell they put on there, that was when I knew I would never buy another.
tony petruzzi said on 08-05-2005 at 3:54 PM #
I personally have always bought nothing but Dells. They have been nothing but the best in terms of a machine that lasts the ages. Every machine will break, every single one. When this happens, yeah it's a pain the ass to deal with, but to say that Dell in is the new Packard Bell is the dumbest thing I've heard. IBM's are great (I actually worked for them in the early 90's) but they are double the price of a Dell and don't look anyway near as good (XPS laptop.... drooooooool).

Besides being the best in the computer hardware market, they are also the best in the comuter software market. I can't tell you how many people I know have a copy of WinXP and / or Office2003 from Dell. ;)
Jon said on 08-05-2005 at 4:09 PM #
We buy dells here in the office. Nothing but dells. I've replaced probably 10-15 dell hard drives. I built my own laptop. Pentium M, it lasts 4 hours. I built from an ASUS barebone and it was actually a lot easier to build than a desktop. Just pop open the keyboard, stick the CPU in it, stick some ram in it. Add a hard drive and CDRom and it was up and running! It was cheaper too. I know building computers isn't ideal for an office environment (that's why the office still has Dells), but for your personal/consulting computer it is probably worth it.
Mike Rankin said on 08-05-2005 at 4:42 PM #
Sorry to hear about your customer support problems with Dell. Dont' bother posting your experience to their support forums. They've been removing most of "Dell Hell" posts. Rest assured, you're not alone. Googleing "Dell Hell" turns up hundres of thousands of blog entries.
PaulC said on 08-05-2005 at 4:53 PM #
There's nothing that says you can't put them on hold when they call you back.

Turnabout is fair play. My rule with customer service is if you waste my time, I waste twice as much of yours.
Roland said on 08-05-2005 at 5:25 PM #
That's a shame! We've purchased well over $150k worth of Dell servers over the past 12 months, and the (very) few problems that we've had have been solved within 24 hours by a technician that they send to us!

Did you buy the guaranteed support contracts? I'll never buy another computer without one after the great service they've provided.
Simon Horwith said on 08-05-2005 at 5:35 PM #
I don't agree with putting people on hold just to get even. That only wastes time and money for that company... this cost, in turn, gets passed on to consumers. I don't want to pay for the fact that some people think it's cute to put Dell on hold. Why should anyone's time be wasted - mine or theirs? I prefer to simply tell everyone I know that in my opinion Dell support sucks, and I will choose not buy any Dell unless it's because it's a really cheap deal and then I'd make the purchase without the support (since it's useless anyway). I was shocked that they couldn't find my support agreement in the US when I'd purchased an international support agreement. Hell, I went to Dell.co.uk and put the support number in and was able to pull the details up via their website. It's ridiculous that US help desk people can't think to do the same. I was also shocked to find that the 24 hour international support contract that I paid for actually didn't guarante me a god damn thing... except, as I said, the right to change the country on my contract (which takes 5 days) and then be entitled to 24 hour support. I got the international contract because I travel a lot (especially when I lived in the UK) - I needed to know I'd be taken care of quickly wherever I was. Thank god I never needed it while travelling in Europe or Asia... I would have been screwed.
Michael James said on 08-05-2005 at 5:57 PM #
I had a dell desktop give me problems in 2000 so I bought a dell laptop with gold level service. Thank god I did. Over the next 2 1/2 years the motherboard died and was replaced THREE TIMES!!!

After that I put together my own systems with better parts and have not had a single failure. That and I bought a couple of G5s and not so much as a hiccup with either.

I have a friend who runs IT for a big bank that said you have to buy the service plan with Dell because they put garbage in the base systems. As he said "They're gonna break".
Roger Lancefield said on 08-05-2005 at 6:57 PM #
As the saying goes, a company that has neither the time nor resource to service their customers adequately simply has too many of them!

[Add Comment] [Subscribe to Comments]