Re: Service rant

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 11:01:46AM -0600, Brock Campbell wrote:
> I guess I have had a different opinion. over the years I've owned and
> dealt with Dell and had reasonable to good service for most of it.
>
> The trick is to stay away from the "Home/Home Office" side of the house
> like it was filled with Venomous vipers, tarantula's and sharks with
> laser beams on their heads.
>
> The small business side gives you a North American Service department,
> and people who will listen when you tell them you 'may' know a thing or
> two about computers. The other trick is to buy from the corporate side
> of the line. Latitude and Optiplex. They seem marginally better built,
> and the service lines are different, and less scripted.
>
> Perhaps I'm unique in still thinking Dell is better than the other
> options, but every time I've tried other Tier 1 vendors, I've had a much
> worse experience.

I think you make an important point about business vs consumer divisions.
That seems to be universal, be it Tier-I computer vendors, local retailers
or even ISPs.

I have an ancient Dell desktop (>10 year old 486) running as my firewall,
the bearings in the hard drive are just now starting to squeel on occasion.
I know of a couple of people who've had good luck with Dell on the quality
front and decent experiences with support.

I've heard nothing but horror stories dealing with HP. The exceptaion may
be the Proliant server guys, that stuff was Compaq's bread and butter before
HP consumed them, HP needs to keep Proliant customers happy because the
printer ink monopoly ain't working.

I've heard good stories with IBM but mostly from big customers but I did
read one story about Lenovo fixing a fried USB port on a laptop that was
well out of warranty. I would have bought a Lenovo instead of Dell but I
preferred Dell's keyboard/touchpad arrangement over Lenovo's.

So far, my two complaints about Dell are:

1. The options available on-line are not consistent within a product family,
for example, the Inspiron 6400 with T7200 didn't offer the same selection
of wireless networking as the same model with other processors.

2. The sales and pre-sales folks either on-line or telephone were like
Future Shop sales boys. Kind of slimey, not really knowing the answers but
saying what they think will get the sale. Basically asking the same
question of 3 different people gets 3 different answers.

My laptop has a 4 year on-site warranty, including the oopsie (accidental
damange) coverage. I'll let y'all know what happens if/when I need it
serviced.
Received on Thu Feb 1 11:26:38 2007