Dell Support SUCKS!!!!!....UPDATE Post #27

[WebmasterAlex]

I've never liked Dell but the issue you are starting to see with ALL computer manufacturers is that computers have become commodity items.
What makes it especially difficult when compared to say a TV is that a lot of the problems can be the result of user error. That is why they try to get you to the reload windows stage, if that works chances are pretty good it's something you did, if it doesn't then they know they have a real hardware issue.
As for geek squad and the rest of them, the in store techs get paid 12 bucks an hour, what kind of support do you think your going to get?

 

[simonkodousek]

I'm so sorry to hear about your experience with Dell. We've sworn never to buy one of their computers ever again, mainly because the customer support sucks and when you have a problem, they will deny it either out of cluelessness or laziness.

My laptop is an HP/Compaq and has only had one problem involving the hard drive, which HP had fixed (free of charge) in 3 days, including shipping.

I also have an iMac which has been great except for a motherboard failure, which I got them to fix for free.

Good luck!

 

[dpuck1998]

I'm so sorry to hear about your experience with Dell. We've sworn never to buy one of their computers ever again, mainly because the customer support sucks and when you have a problem, they will deny it either out of cluelessness or laziness.

My laptop is an HP/Compaq and has only had one problem involving the hard drive, which HP had fixed (free of charge) in 3 days, including shipping.

I also have an iMac which has been great except for a motherboard failure, which I got them to fix for free.

Good luck!

Good point on the macs, they are computers just like any other. They are not bullet proof. In fact I support about 100 macs and over 1000 PCs. I send in a higher percentage of macs for issues than I do PCs.

 

[lorax123]

I have an HP laptop that is over 6 years old. It was an early Windows XP machine and I reinstall XP every couple of years. Most peoples problems stem from install/uninstall of programs and .dll file conflicts, etc. I reinstall of the OS usually fixes the problem. That said, laptops are much more prone to hardware issues. Of course the fact that they get banged around is a lot of the issue, but the generate a lot of heat also. People will set them on a couch and overheat them. Most new, year or so, machines now have vents on the side. Older machines had the fan at the bottom and sitting on the couch would block the fan and overheat the machine.

I've always found a re-formatting fixes alot of sins and is always a good idea after a year or two. It is a royal PITA, but if you have your stuff backed-up, it's not horrible and if there's no hardware problems, it runs great afterwards.

I know all the stuff I download, install and uninstall on my machine over two years is a lot... This current computer I can not figure out what the heck has happened to all the drive space. I'm to the point of just throwing in the towel and starting over.

But apparently FIL and MIL got us a new computer for X-mas, which is great! But I really hope they got a No Name barebones kit! I love building my own system and not having all the proprietary hardware and silly software the store bought's come with.

 

[Chkultr]

Wow, I'm really surprised. I have never had trouble with Dell support. Now HP, thats a whole other story!

My mother in law,father in law, aunt, and uncle have dell. This is the reason my household has HP!

DLBS..I could not help but read your conversation with the Dell agent without using an Indian accent! When I have to use Dell I usually try and use the online chat instead of calling. I can't help but get and stay frustrated with the tech support. All they are doing is reading from a screen with no real computer experience. So they really don't understand your problem.
Sounds like you could have done a complete system restore on your own and fixed the problem...

My father in law has the 1505 laptop. It is not even a year old and I already replaced the memory and I am waiting on a new hard drive to arrive so I can replace that!

Thanks for venting for all of us that have and will be in your shoes! Good luck and I hope all works out in the end!

 

[Willow1213]

Laptops in general just don't last long, which sucks. If anyone knows of a laptop that has lasted them 3 or 4 years, please make yourself known!

Oh I have! I got an iBook G4 my first year of college (January '05) and it has lasted like a champ! I have only had one small problem, which Apple fixed, and that pesky battery recall thing a couple years ago. I love my Mac bust I mainly just use it for web browsing and minor things now. I would love to splurge and buy myself a new Macbook Pro, but I just can't do it since my old one still works just great!

Sorry to hear about Dell support. Sony's is just as bad. I had my motherboard die a week before my warranty went up and they said "mail it to us at this address" and I did. When it got to them ( a week later) they said "sorry, it's out of warranty" DUH!!! That's why I contacted you a WEEK AGO! Never again...

~Abby

 

[DLBDS]

Well, after 3 hours of dealing with Dell tech support yesterday evening, they have agreed that my problem is......the motherboard. Gee, go figure. During the process of loading drivers etc. I got the BSoD again. I gave the error code to the agent (Shivani) and after being on hold while she 'investigated' the code, she came back and said it was the motherboard and they would send out a technician. She gave me a service # and said someone would call me within 2 days to set up an appointment. I was amazed at how fast it went at this point. I have to admit that Shivani was very nice to deal with. Not very personable (they never are though) but hey, they did what I told them to do and they had a person "with a (mostly) American accent" call me. She was a breath of fresh air. The coolest part was when she linked to my computer and was doing everything remotely. Very cool. I've never had that done before. The downside...while she was doing her thing for just under 1 hour....I was on hold. My ear was numb when I finally hung up the phone.

I'll post again after the tech enters on the scene......

 

[zulemara]

I am not surprised by the dell situation, nor am I about the GS situation and quite frankly, I agree with the above poster's rant about GS taking advantage of a very vulnerable market. Most people can't even understand the concept of where their music actually IS on their hard drive, nonetheless being able to diagnose a problem and fix it.

As for laptops, I had an HP pavillion since Feb 2005 and just recently sold it. I kept it clean by partitioning the hard drive and having windows on one drive and installed programs on another. That tends to at least keep the machine running faster. I had a warranty for 4 years and actually sent it in to HP in about early Feb 2008. They replaced the battery(which didn't hold a charge), the power cord(which had exposed wires) and the fan on the processor that was causing it to overheat. Although these were a lot of repairs, it was all really easy to handle. I self-diagnosed it as much as I could, then took it to GS because they are an authorized HP repair center. They said they would have to send the computer in, but since I had in home repair available, they had me call HP and get a box sent to me. I just told the HP guy that GS said it was overheating and he sent everything. I had the laptop back in less than a week.

Now I have a Macbook pro and couldn't be happier. I sold my custom built desktop and haven't looked back!

all pre built computers are mass manufactured and subject to the same failures. The difference between companies is support and I've always had good luck emailing back and forth with HP. I always recommend them, but that's just me.

 

[astrodrummergirl]

Agent (Gunjan_131905): "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. We assure you that we would try to isolate and fix this issue as quick as possible. We defiantly understand your concern. We would provide you quality service and would surely replace the part, incase any part would need replacement."

Thats the first paragraph of the first email I had back from dell customer supprt as well when my computer had problems. I was sent my PC with a naff graphics card which displayed colours wrong, displayed lines were there shouldn't have been and had, what looked like, dead pixels.

I had 2 or 3 emails back from dell after that one, and having at least 3 friends who all do Computer Science related courses and build computers themselves, was told that my GPU had basically exploded and at least the graphics card needed replacing, maybe even the motherboard depending on severety. So knowing this, I started nudging towards them that it needed to be sent in to be fixed, but oh no, the agent wanted to diagnose the problem that I had explained to her, which I already know the outcome.

So, in the end, I paid £40, probably $70 maybe (not sure on exchange rate), on a brand new graphics card, even though I'd already paid for an upgraded one, however, I didn't mind buying a new one, as it is twice as good as the previous, and a hell of a lot of games work better.

 

[FireDancer]

We have many Dell PCs here at work and we don’t even bother with Dell Support.

Calling Dell is just a painful experience. You get someone who learned English yesterday and says in a heavy accent…”Hello, my name is Bob”...uh, no it isn’t!

Let’s hope they add an India pavilion to World Showcase and then we can just bring our laptops to Disney with us for repair.

 

[doconeill]

I hate dealing with EVERYONE's tech support. I'm a high-tech person. I built many of my own computers, until I got lazy and started buying Dells given the price and generally impressed by the hardware at work. I test out everything before I even think about picking up the phone, because I KNOW the people who answer the phone don't know anything about the equipment, but simply follow the script...

"My computer fails to boot."

"Have you tried rebooting it?"

"Uh...it doesn't boot at all."

"Have you checked the power cord?"

"Yes. The light comes on, but it doesn't boot."

"Have you tried a different mouse?"

"What the #@!!% does that have to do with it?!?"

That's pretty much how it always goes.

I bought a brand new Dell desktop last year. It worked great, except if I had a USB hard drive connected, in which case it froze on the opening Dell screen. If I connected it after it booted, it was fine, but don't forget to disconnect before rebooting...I tried multiple drives, etc. That was pretty useless to me, so I called. Stoopid me. I actually yelled at the poor person after a while because they felt that having to disconnect the drive every boot was an acceptable solution.

The whole story is here. In summary, after a montherboard replacement, whole box replacement, etc. (with which they "could not duplicate the problem", although there testing methods left a lot to be desired), it turned out to be a seemingly unrelated BIOS option, and the solution given to me not by Dell, but by another person with the same problem on the same box who went through the same thing...

 

[dpuck1998]

I hate dealing with EVERYONE's tech support. I'm a high-tech person. I built many of my own computers, until I got lazy and started buying Dells given the price and generally impressed by the hardware at work. I test out everything before I even think about picking up the phone, because I KNOW the people who answer the phone don't know anything about the equipment, but simply follow the script...

"My computer fails to boot."

"Have you tried rebooting it?"

"Uh...it doesn't boot at all."

"Have you checked the power cord?"

"Yes. The light comes on, but it doesn't boot."

"Have you tried a different mouse?"

"What the #@!!% does that have to do with it?!?"

That's pretty much how it always goes.

I bought a brand new Dell desktop last year. It worked great, except if I had a USB hard drive connected, in which case it froze on the opening Dell screen. If I connected it after it booted, it was fine, but don't forget to disconnect before rebooting...I tried multiple drives, etc. That was pretty useless to me, so I called. Stoopid me. I actually yelled at the poor person after a while because they felt that having to disconnect the drive every boot was an acceptable solution.

The whole story is here. In summary, after a montherboard replacement, whole box replacement, etc. (with which they "could not duplicate the problem", although there testing methods left a lot to be desired), it turned out to be a seemingly unrelated BIOS option, and the solution given to me not by Dell, but by another person with the same problem on the same box who went through the same thing...

Here is my conversation,

Yep...
Yep..
Yep....
uh huh....


I have actually troubleshot computers with the "tech support" and I wasn't even near the computer. I already knew what was wrong with it so I just sit on the phone and pretend to do what they ask until the pass me on or issue an RMA!!

its kinda fun to mess with them too...yea, well just a second let me check to see if that socket work...I'll plug in my lava lamp...

 

[zulemara]

Here is my conversation,

Yep...
Yep..
Yep....
uh huh....


I have actually troubleshot computers with the "tech support" and I wasn't even near the computer. I already knew what was wrong with it so I just sit on the phone and pretend to do what they ask until the pass me on or issue an RMA!!

its kinda fun to mess with them too...yea, well just a second let me check to see if that socket work...I'll plug in my lava lamp...

LOL I do the same thing. I already know what the problem is before I call. Usually I'm just looking for confirmation so I can get an RMA and be on my way