Laptops??

[Dan Murphy]

As for Dell service, I can only relate my personal experience. I have/had 5 over the years. I currently have 3 Dells in service, my brand new home one (less than a month), my laptop and office desktop, both about 9 months old. My just recently retired home desktop, which was almost 4 years old (really was working fine, just wanted more current) and my original one from back in '86, actually before Dell was called Dell (called PC Ltd back then, and to think I helped Mike get where he is, LOL). I have dealt with both local (TX or wherever) techs, as well as overseas techs (India or wherever) (BTW, VERY commom for many companies and industries today), both on home and office PC's, and was totally satisfied, both via the phone only as well as on site, next day.

My broker dealer, a HUGE global financial firm, just recently standardized, globally, from IBM to Dell. I thought IBM was fine. I did talk with the Phillippines one time on the IBM, Armonk other times. My previous laptop, personally owned, as are all my machines, was an IBM, had service calls too, and they were fine. I did have a nAcer along the way there too, talked to them in the Dominican Republic. I do think any company, like IBM, Toshiba, HP/Compaq, Dell, etc, do not get to the stature they are on poor service nor product. If they lose it, they will fail. An example seems to be Gateway. A player of greater magnitude some years back, they seem to have lost their blip on the radar. Companies today need to stay cutting edge, both in product and support, or they will be gone in short order. The market/customer demands both. I think the companies mentioned in the various posts above are all fine, IMO.

I think any company can have specific instances of failure to satisfy or not meet expectations, but in general, most do well.

 

[Alex]

Dell sells millions of computers. I have to admit that the vast majority of the buyers never experience a problem. Since I do computer networks for a living I see way more problems than the average consumer. Sometimes they are setteled easily, other times they turn into horror shows.
It just seems to me that Dell's handling of the "horror shows" has went downhill.
I'm not surprised that your brokerage house went to Dell. They have made a decision to support the huge corporate customers (which are the vast majority of their sales) at the expense of the consumer type customer as the outsourcing of service clearly shows.