Am I the Only One?
Sep 18 '00
Amid the seeming tidal wave of adulation directed at Dell, I often feel that I'm alone in my experience with the company and their products. We've got 12 Dell laptops (Inspiron 3800 and 5000) in our company. Three of them arrived non-functional out of the box. The screen on a fourth laptop, less than 6 months old, is defective. Not a good ratio! As Director, IT for our company, I don't have hours to spend on the Dell's tech support line to fix brand new laptops that should be working.
Unfortunately, my experience with two Dimensions desk top machines hasn't been any better. Beginning with an internal tape drive that worked exactly 6 times before quitting, to crashing hard drives, it's been an odyssey of endless hours on the tech support line. I spoke to no less than 14 different technicians to resolve the tape drive problem - many of whom required that I begin the diagnosis process from scratch all over again. I spent more than 120 hours on the phone over the course of 6 months. At their direction, I reinstalled the OS (and subsequently, all applications) three times.
During the first reinstallation I discovered that the CD on which they'd sent me Windows NT Workstation was defective. They refused to replace it even though calls to Microsoft confirmed that Dell had the authority to send a replacement. I had to purchase NT at my own expense. This failed to solve the problem. It was many more weeks on the phone and two more reinstallations of the operating system before they'd finally consent to replacing the tape drive - first with one that failed to function and again, after much complaining on my part, with one that finally worked. It was simply a bad tape drive all along. Now I get to enjoy this all over again in repairing a crashed disk. Welcome to Dell's Next Day Business Service.
Our company will be looking to purchase 30-50 more laptops over the next year or so, and doubling again in the following year - and you can bet they won't be Dells! We've been a part of Dell's business alliance that is supposed to deliver escalated customer service but this is going to change. More often than not, our repeated phone calls are returned days later - if they're returned at all. Needless to say, I'm now looking for a vendor who can provide reliable laptops - or barring that, at least machines that aren't broken right out of the box. I've found hard, cold reliability, functionality, pricing, support delivery and customer satisfaction data on TBR's web site (www.tectrak.com) that places Dell and other vendors in a more accurate and measurable light apart from all the subjective "gushing". In addition to providing me with the objective info I need to make corporate buying decisions, the data has shown me that, with respect to Dell, I'm decidedly not alone.
If there is any truth to what I suspect is only self-propagating myth concerning the quality of Dell's products and service, I certainly have not experienced it. If this is what constitutes the quality, reliabilty and excellent service I keep reading about, things are worse than I thought! On the plus side, I've been able to purchase inoperable laptops in any configuration I've wanted! Oh yeah - and they offer a 3 year warranty - you may need every last nanosecond of it.
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Epinions.com ID:
scubaman
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Member: Tony Carrozza
Location: Burlingame, California
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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