Dell Support Or Lack Thereof: My Dell Hell Experience

I know. A story about problems with Dell and customer support aren’t new. I
know about Jeff Jarvis,
his experience
and the "been there, done that" feel of another blogger writing about Dell
issues. But coming back from a trip and finding my recently repaired Dell
desktop failing to boot as has been the case on several other occasions — I’ve
had it. Like Jeff writing
his open letter
to Dell in 2005 on his newly purchased Powerbook, I compose this letter on my
fairly newly purchased MacBook
Pro. My plea is simple. Empower your customer service people to simply
replace things that don’t work rather than making them jump through whatever
procedures you have in place that clearly don’t work. Want the longer story?
Then read on.

I’ve been using a PC since literally the PC days began, working off one of
the original IBMs with dual floppy drives in college. I bought a clone in
college, then stepped up to a Gateway and then began building my own from
scratch.

Building your own is an immensely satisfying experience, but as I had less
time, I shifted back to purchasing prebuilt machines. I went with Gateway, then
shifted to a Dell refurbished machine back in 2000. My first experience with
Dell, and it was a good one. I began buying machines from them on a regular
basis.

I tend to buy a new desktop every two or three years. As Windows users know,
Windows tends to get bogged down as you add new programs over time. The crud
builds, and while a fresh install can make things peppy and fast, it made better
business sense for me to get a new machine.

So that Celeron-powered Dell L500C I got in 2000? I stepped up to a Dell 8200
with a powerful Pentium 4 (heh) processor in 2000. When it bogged down,
I made the jump again, this
time paying about $5,000 for a top-of-the-line XPS 600 in September 2005. This
was a loaded system (for the time). A Pentium Extreme dual processor (duals were
new at the time) with a RAID drive configured for performance and dual nVidia
processors to handle my three
screen multimonitor setup.

It was an expensive computer. That’s OK — I believe in paying for good
tools, and my computer is the main tool I use. I didn’t want to be bogged down
by anything — and pretty much, the computer’s still happily running all my
software at a good speed. That is, when it boots.

I go on many trips, so the computer’s off for a week or two or three in a
row. Last year, I noticed when I came back that it wouldn’t boot. The fan would
kick on, rev to a high speed, but no activity from the computer itself. I tried
a couple of times, and it finally came on.

It worried me a bit. I’d had a problem once before where the computer booted
to BIOS but wouldn’t recognize my hard drive. I believe I called tech support,
they offered a suggestion, and I was thrilled it worked.

I worried something wasn’t quite right with the computer, but being busy and
it having booted properly several times in a row, I carried on with it.

Then in August, again after being gone on a trip, I had the boot failure
again. This time I called technical support. We tried various things, and as a
last ditch effort, the rep had me pull my memory chips and reseat them. That
solved the problem.

Weird. Still somewhat wary of the computer, my reaction was to move my data
over to an external hard drive. That way if the computer did die, at least my
data was safe (and yes, I backed up the external hard drive on a regular basis
to the computer itself).

More trips, and once or twice I had the same problem again. Pulling the
memory chips or the video card solved it. But by December, I’d had it. I called
Dell and told them I wanted this solved. I’d suggested I’d be happy to simply
have a new computer sent out, even one that I’d buy at a discount. But that
wasn’t a possible solution, I was told.

Instead, they sent a rep out to fix my computer. We played tag for several
days. I told Dell to tell me when he was coming, so I could completely clear off
my hard drive before he worked on the system. If he needed to take the hard
drive in, I didn’t want any data going with it. Instead, Dell just sent him out
without giving me any heads-up. I got a call saying he was trying to find my
house one day, and my response was I wasn’t ready to have the computer repaired.
He was cool with that — and said he’d tell Dell to rebook and give me notice.
They didn’t. They sent him out again without telling me, and again he had to go
back doing nothing. And they did it again. This time, I felt sorry for him and
quickly worked to clear the data off before he arrived.

I was promised the tech would diagnose my machine’s problem and solve it.
Dell’s support made a big deal of this — that he’d figure out exactly what was
wrong. He didn’t. He had no diagnostic equipment at all. Instead, he had a new
motherboard. Dell guessed — I have to stress the guessed part — that the
motherboard might be to blame. So he came to replace that. He did, and the
computer which was already working when he came (I had done the memory card
game) continued to work, so supposedly everything was fine.

Another trip in March. Another return. Another failure to boot, the fan doing
its usual haywire dance. I’d really had it. I called Dell, got through to a tech
rep, jumped to a manager and again pleaded — why not just give me a new machine
or sell me one at a discount?

Let me stress — it’s not a cost issue for me. This is a business expense and
not even that major of one. I really should simply buy a new computer and
abandon this old desktop as a lost cause. I could get a quad-processor, RAID
hard drive, dual video

XPS system from Dell for about $2,200 now — half what I paid for my old
system. Downgrade (and see here) that puppy to XP from Vista, and I’d be a happy camper.

Instead, it’s more a point of principle. I have a warranty with Dell for a
computer that works, not for a computer that requires me to crawl under my desk
and yank out memory chips to get it started after an absence.

Still, Dell wouldn’t replace the machine. Instead, they wanted to again send
a rep out who would diagnose the machine. Uh, huh — just like last time? I knew
better. My response was that if he came again, he’d better bring parts to
replace everything in the machine, since nothing was going to be diagnosed.

That wasn’t a popular response, despite it being entirely appropriate. We
went a few rounds where the rep tried to explain that I wasn’t being reasonable
while I explained that all Dell was doing was guessing at what part might be
defective — so to save time all around, they should replace everything.

Eventually, I agreed to have the computer shipped back to the factory. This
meant again stripping it of any data. In fact, I reformatted the drives
entirely, just to be safe. A pain,
but I’d been living on my new
MacBook for several days at that point. At least when the Dell came back,
I’d have a clean, fresh peppy system.

To do this, I needed to get it to boot again. It was getting really finicky,
where just pulling all the chips and replacing them wasn’t enough. I eventually
did a trial-and-error process of putting each one in one-by-one, isolating one
chip that seemed to be the troublemaker. I put that in a baggie with a note,
then the entire computer was collected.

A few days later, someone at the Dell factory called. I was amazed. Suddenly,
I was talking to a friendly person who seemed actually concerned about the state
of my machine. He’d noted that the machine’s drives had been changed to a RAID
system configured for redundancy rather than performance as originally
delivered, something I’d done as part of the reformatting process. He told me
that there had been issues with these drives, so he wanted to replace them
entirely, so which RAID setup did I want? Wow — replacing the drives? Cool,
nice service. Plus he saw my note about the bad memory chip and decided he’d
just replace all of them, to be safe. Again, cool — nice!

The machine came back in mid-March. I loaded up all my key software, my
Firefox plug-ins, etc. Again, a pain — but it was super responsive. I no longer
had to boot and then wait the three minutes for all the start-up crud to be over
with (and yes, this despite me turning off tons of stuff in the past using
msconfig).

Time for another trip, this time being away three weeks in April. Today I
tried to boot the machine, so I could start using it for work on Monday. Yep. No
boot. Instead, the fan went hyperactive as usual.

I called Dell while crawling under my desk to pull memory chips once again. I
skipped past the initial rep and went right to a manager. It pretty much went
downhill from there.

I gave the manager my service tag, told him the computer was failing to boot
and left it as that, to see what he’d say. The response was that he could see my
motherboard had been replaced. Really, I asked — you don’t see this was also
sent to your factory and serviced? Yes — he could see that it had gone in but
had no idea what was done to it there.

Appalling. Bear in mind at this point, he’s still in the mode of
thinking he’s going to help me figure out what’s wrong with my computer. He has
no idea that the hard drives or memory chips have already been replaced. I know
this, but Dell’s system apparently don’t inform him of it. Yet this is the
person who is supposed to decide what happens next to get my computer fixed.

I filled him in on the past history and that I’d just like to have the
computer replaced, either for free or for a discount. No, no — that can’t be
done. Instead, he said a tech would be sent out and that it was probably a
"minor" problem. Exact quote — I began taking written notes at this point.

I explained that it was hardly minor, that this is the exact same problem I’d
been having and that has failed to be corrected by two servicing now. I also
explained that I wasn’t happy to have a tech come out, since all that tech would
do was to bring a part that Dell guesses might be faulty rather than knowing for
certain what was wrong.

OK — I could send it to the factory, I was told. Sigh. Yes, I could do that
– but since it already had been to the factory where it was "fixed" the first
time, would it come back guaranteed fixed this time? Yes — he was happy to
guarantee that it would totally be fine. Seriously, that’s what he said. He felt
comfortable saying it because "we’ll make sure this time that we’ll be taking
care of this repair."

How reassuring. I guess last time they just didn’t care enough to repair it
properly but if you send it in a second time, then it really gets fixed.

I didn’t let him off that easily. How will they know what’s wrong? Are they
going to replace the video cards this time, all the other parts that haven’t yet
been replaced? Because clearly last time whatever diagnostics were run didn’t
catch the error.

At this point, he tried to get me back to talking about the problem, so he
could let another tech rep help me get the computer going. Sigh. I explained it
was the exact same problem that I’d been having, and I solved it already using
the memory chip pulling game a tech rep told me back in August, so what else was
anyone going to diagnose? The problem remained that if I went away, I came back
to a machine that wouldn’t boot and had a hyperactive fan.

"I can’t believe this," he responded to the problem. What? He couldn’t
believe the computer was acting the way I was telling him. No, he couldn’t. "I’m
the agent. I know what the problem is," was another thing he told me as we
discussed this. Except, of course, he had no idea what the problem is. He just
simply couldn’t believe that being off for several days could be an issue. Sure,
so I’m either a liar or insane

We went back to what was going to happen at the factory. He said he’d mention
that the fan probably needed to be replaced. Hold on there, pardner! What’s the
fan go to do with anything. Yes, it revs fast when I try to boot, when I’ve been
gone for several days. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the fan is at
fault. Replacing the fan might fix nothing.

"They will do a diagnosis first. They will know the parts that
need to be repaired," I was told.

So will they fix these parts, then put the machine in a corner for
two weeks, then try to boot it? No, no — they can’t do something like that.
Then how will they know the problem is really solved, I asked — since it being
off for several days is related to whatever’s going wrong. He had no answer for
this.

Enough. I said to collect the machine on Tuesday, since I have
next business day service. He said they’d come Wednesday, since today was
Sunday. I tried to figure that out. Calling on Sunday, Monday is technically the
next business day to act on my service need. But hey, I figured expecting
Tuesday collection threw in an extra day for good measure. Guess I hoped for too
much.

Meanwhile, it looks like I’m on the MacBook for at least a week or
two longer. With a business trip the week after that, then another one after
that, it probably makes no sense to get back to my desktop — if it even works
when it gets back.

I know one thing — when I do buy a new desktop, probably after my
move back to California, it’s really unlikely to be Dell. Dell

blogged recently I found about new customer service options coming in North
America. Heh — maybe that will win me over. All I know is the customer service
here in the UK for me has sucked. The amount of time consumed, the amount of
dissatisfaction I’ve felt, simply because they can’t ship a new computer even at
a discounted price. Insane.