Price: high. Quality: Fair to poor. Service: Unhelpful.
Written: Jun 22 '00
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Pros: Good performance before it crapped out
Cons: The bloody thing isn't working and we can't figure out what's wrong
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| s_trimble's Full Review: Dell Dimension XPS T500 |
I must first state that I am not a computer expert. But my family does own a Dell Dimension XPS-T500 computer, with a 500-mhz Pentium III processor, 17-inch monitor, DVD-ROM drive, 128 meg RAM and all the other bells and whistles. The price as of last year: Over $1700 with delivery. The computer was bought by my father, who'd wanted a nice machine for a long time.
According to him, the ordering process was pleasant enough, though they did talk him into the DVD drive, which he didn't understand and didn't need. I suppose that's part of their job.
When we first got the computer nearly a year ago, it worked beautifully. It was fast, and we were set up with the internet quickly and easily. We chose AT&T Worldcom, and have been very pleased with that service. Everything was fairly easy to hook up, clearly labeled and well-laid-out. As for software packages, the Dell came with some demo programs, limited-version games, and various other programs. Astonishingly, it did not come with Microsoft Office! It had Word and Works pre-loaded, but not Excel or Powerpoint. I looked through a recent Dell catalogue, and it looked like every computer they sold came with Office, so I find this a bit strange.
As we used the computer, other strange things began to happen. It would lock up when it went into power-saver mode after being left on for a while. It would lock up during start up and shut down. Games would become unplayable because the screen would pixillate into green specks. Text would become garbled. The computer was mission-critical. I became very familiar with safe mode.
I'm not an expert, as I stated before, but I'm not a total computer ignoramous, either. At least I knew enough to use the help menu to troubleshoot the problem. The best I could do was to turn off the hardware accelerators. That seemed to help, but the computer now ran more slowly, and would still freeze up if it was restarted. I checked the Dell website, which was helpful, but ultimately led me nowhere. I was unable to troubleshoot the problem there. I was under the impression that some buggy software had been loaded and was causing a conflict somewhere, so I emptied all the temporary internet files and hoped for the best. This didn't seem to change anything.
Then, disaster. The modem completely stopped working, saying it could find no dialtone. I assumed it had been fried in a thunderstorm, but the computer was under warranty, so I gave up and called technical support. They ran me through a set of tactics to find the problem. No luck. They said it wasn't my modem, because it was testing fine. They told me it must be the phone line. So I called Bell Atlantic (another customer-service nightmare), and was eventually told the line was fine.
Now we are stuck with no modem, and the warranty on the computer has just expired. Was Dell trying to stall so they wouldn't have to send someone out and give us a free modem? Maybe, maybe not. But on the whole, I am very much less than pleased with the total Dell experience.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 1700
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 401-500
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
s_trimble
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Member: Stephen Trimble
Location: West Chester, PA
Reviews written: 127
Trusted by: 94 members
About Me:
I'm back to my roots, writing business newsletters for Progressive Business Publications.
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