BuzzMachine

“your customers have lots and lots of friends all around the world.”

- people have a elephant memory for thing going wrong!
- 6th degrees of separation: thru internet you will have a much chance that some one knows some one who is going thru a Dell Hell!

Too bad you had a bad experience with em’, I know thier customer service has really gone down in quality these last few years but then so has everyone’s…

If you really want to get a PC done right shop around for a good local PC repairman or learn to build/repair one yourself.

Often times you can build a PC for noticably less than a high end Dell (minus those crazy cupons of course, I used one myself recently to get a BFG7800GT for $345 shipped when they were selling for $420 elswhere! but I’d never buy a whole PC other than a laptop from them….), those low end bundles are usually unbeatable, but then you get what you pay for…

We’re currently on our second Dell PC and in need of a new desktop or laptop, or, likely, both. I’d like a wireless laptop for my blogging and my wife would sure enjoy having a desktop PC freed up for her, as I spend a lot of time on our sole PC now and it frustrates her to no end.

I don’t think a week goes by that we do not receive a Dell email offering big discounts on their products. But we’ve been a tad reluctant to remain loyal Dell customers, as we’ve read the bad press of late and, frankly, your post, Jeff, may have sealed the deal for us.

I’ve posted on customer service nightmares with other services and products, and pointed in my blog to what seems a significant deterioration in the Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma programs that not too long ago were being zealously embraced by most major Fortune 500 companies. Indeed, my wife just recently bought and received a defective Motorola cell phone!

So on the strength of your credibility, Jeff, we’ll look elsewhere for our next PC(s).

I too have been warning people away from Dells, after the appauling service and quailty of their products.

After 11 years of using PCs, it only took 1 year with a Dell and now I’m using an ibook. So I’ll give Dell some credit for helping me discover Apple.

I have a few nightmare stories without ever buying a computer from Dell. My roommate in college ordered a Dell. It came in, we turned it on, the lights went on but the CD-ROM drive wasn’t working. Luckily I have been inside computers, having always built every one I owned, except my laptop and an Alienware I bought (which has since been replaced with another custom built one). The power wasn’t connected to the CD-ROM drive. Who, being a typical user, would have known to check this? This was Fall 1998.

After reading this, I’m even more glad I build my own :)

No, Ed, I gave them all the advice they need for free.

I don’t think the point is that Jeff had a bad experience and others had better experience (I have three Dell products, and I’m happy with them).

The point is that this is what happens when companies ignore the conversation. The negative talk doesn’t go away. Instead, it becomes the dominant key message attached to that company, no matter how many marketing dollars are spent on TV commercials and newspaper inserts.

You can’t buy and control a one-way conversation anymore. Some companies just aren’t getting it.

It’s like the United Airlines stories in Cluetrain. It would be funny, but those online follies happened 10 years ago and that just makes this pathetic.

Sorry about all your Dell problems…but at least you don’t have a Gateway.

My first computer was a gateway, and it was the worst purchase I ever made. When I went to college, I decided to give Dell a try. Maybe 2001 was a good year, because my Dell is one of the best computers I’ve ever had. Everything still runs just as well as it used to, hell, I even dropped the moniter on a hardwood floor, cracked the casing, and it still works.

True, all the customer service representatives may be Indian (dots, not feathers), but at least you can get in touch with them. While the gateway was non-existent and left me on hold for hours at a time, the very helpful dell reps hold a special place in my heart for retreiving a Medical Ethics term paper from deep within the reaches of a Dell Desktop. Heck, they even got it to work afterwards too.

Anyway, I do believe that it would be a good thing if Dell designated someone to respond to blogs. Then I could get payed for how I waste my time daily.

Jeff,

Although I am a loyal reader of your site, I only glossed over the various Dell posts over the past few weeks (months?) because they didn’t really interest me, until I finally read this one. Without knowing the specifics of your problem, I will say that I’m sorry you got a bad product and poor customer service, but that I personally have never had a problem with Dell. I’ve owned their PCs in my home for years and we have had them at our office for even longer. I have in the past and would in the future recommend them to others.

I only once had to use their customer service, but they actually were quite helpful to me when I called at 1 in the morning after screwing with my setup so that I couldn’t get on the Internet anymore and the Indian gentleman (who admittedly was tough to understand) told me about the Restore function that got me back to a state before I had screwed everything up. So I just want some of your readers to realize that others have had better experiences with Dell (and it seems to me that you might be just as likely to experience the same thing with Apple, HP, or Gateway.. but maybe not.)

I just sent back my Inspiron 1150 after six-months of misery. The machine worked for two weeks without a problem, then after Dell admitted a HD problem shipped a replacement which never worked properly.

My own “Dell Hell” ensued. Finally, after numerous letters went unanswered I filed a complaint with my state Attorney General, the FTC (over Dell Financial’s harassing actions) and hired a lawyer to oversee my self-handling of the complaint.

The thing is, even if Dell promised to fix or replace the laptop, I don’t really want anything to do with the–ever again.

Doesn’t matter anyway, I still have had no response from Dell.

Interesting letter and meme, however, I have had the same type of experience with my first Apple. I penned a letter to Mr. Jobs and am awaiting a response and a $4,500+ check (computer cost + my time).

The whole sad saga has been blogged about at my blog.

I guess Dell’s lemon and Apple’s lemon will cancel one another out. As I’ve state at my blog, I will never own an Apple again. Yes, it was Halo Hell.

Ken Leebow

PS. I have had people tell me that they will not buy Apple because of my experience. And that’s a good thing.

Apples generally don’t break all that often, but when they do, lord do they break.

Personally, I’m never buying another OEM box. I just built my first computer from the ground up, and for the $1,000 I spent I wouldn’t have gotten 1/2 the performance from an OEM maker.

I may well be the sole voice in the wilderness with something good to say about Dell. I bought a new desktop system a week ago and I’m absolutely thrilled with it.

Initial impressions here: http://www.nevon.net/experimental/2005/08/new_dell_rig_in.html

Mind you, I have had no dealings with anyone at any Dell customer service location, just the sales guys and the website…

Don’t forget the old customer service adage…: “you get great service, you tell a few people, you get horrible service you tell everyyyyyyyyyyyone”

Paco from Canada had trouble posting this but I enjoyed the email so much, I’ll post it for him (making me wish I’d made my service calls in German)….

I live in Canada, and have had great Dell customer service with complete care at home repair. They fix and replace everything no problem. However I have a secret, I speak French, so instead of dealing with Apu, I deal with someone who I can understand.

That being said, I’m buying a new laptop, and it won’t be Dell. Why? Dell Hell stories. I just don’t trust the company anymore because of all of the horror stories i’ve heard and read (blogs, customer reviews).

If I buy another Dell, and go through hell which was universally forecast, I will never forgive myself. Plus Dell techs, replaced about 10 parts on my laptop, on 10 visits (inspiron 8000 total 5000$ canadian not a cheap one)

so much for quality parts, durability sucks.
Adieu Dell

A month ago I bought a new Dell laptop and I love that machine. 2 weeks later I managed to ruin my keyboard by accidently emptying a Coke onto it. I immediatly called Dell support, asking for a new keyboard. No questions where asked, the next day UPS delivered a brand new keyboard, without additional costs.

I LOVE DELL AND I’M NOT ASHAMED OF IT!

Their website sucks bigtime though..

Yes, it’s bad not to pay attention to customer comments, whether in blogs, customer forums, or in the press. And yes, people are coming to understand that Dell can suck.

But self-important “The Blogosphere Is Changing EVERYTHING!!!11!1!1!” kerfuffle doesn’t help your case. Get over yourself!

Sometimes Dell’s incompetence actually works in the customer’s favor. Okay, maybe 1% of the time, but still…

A few years ago a friend ordered a Dell desktop and monitor. Showed up a few days later and everything was fine. The next week, another IDENTICAL PC and monitor arrived. She called Dell to tell them they made a mistake and to come pick it up, and they told her just to keep it! So I think her mom got a new PC too. But of course they now hate Dell like everyone else anyway.

I buy Dells for my corporation. And they work very well. My “secret”?

I buy Gold Level Support. It costs $50 or so. It lets you jump the queue, and you supposedly get someone who knows what they are doing. And, generally – they do.

Also, I am NOT impressed with Inspirons – the build quality on Latitudes seems to be much better.

Well Jeff, you found the ultimate answer to your problem : Apple computers :-)

My wife and I both got Dell laptops about three months ago. Hers up and stopped working about two weeks ago and we got her a powerbook. Mine still works, but will soon be replaced with another powerbook.

Frankly, Dell computers cannot be trusted. Apple, despite all the mistakes they’ve made over the years, is doing a terrific job.

I have never owned a Dell, but I have helped several people through Dell Hell. Not good experiences.

I have been an executive in two major suppliers to Dell. They really do go out of their way to try to get the best quality parts at the price points they choose, and the Dell procuremnet team spends a lot of time on supplier quality. However, no matter how good the parts are, it doesn’t help the after sales service.

I work in the PC component industry, and I have used a lot of laptop brands and have helped a lot of people with even more. For me, the best experience has been IBM (now Lenovo) Thinkpad – for myself (currently, a T42), my kids (X31, T23, t20, …), my parents (t23s), my employees, …

I always buy the better lines – currently T-series or X series thinkpads. Tough, generally well designed, easily serviced anywhere in the world. I had a motherboard replaced in Thailand a couple of years ago, and a display replaced in Japan before that, even though I buy al my systems in the US.

I have had some bad experiences with the I and R series thinkpads (“consumer level”) because they are not designed by IBM/Lenovo (I think the I series was just a relabelled Acer, and I can’t remember who did my R series).

I don’t always buy new (for the kids), but I always buy thinkpad. They sometimes cost more, but they are worth every penny (and if you buy used, the warranty is usually transferrable).

I generally get reasonable tech support. In the US, I usually talk to support in Atlanta or in Canada, but once in a while I get Dublin. I have talked to some really incredible IBM tech support people (people who have actuially worked on PCs themselves and can think beyond the canned scripts). I have also had to endure a few clueless people who can barely read the scripts(When my idiot detector goes off, I just hang up and call back — hold times are usually under 5 minutes, often under 2).

I am not saying IBM support is perfect. I have had support people tell me to reformat my hard drive to fix a driver problem. The repair group isn’t without a few warts either — I had two motherboards replaced on my t40 in less than a month last year, and they “lost” my laptop for a week a couple of years ago), but it is sure better than I have experienced with other PC companies.

Also, I saw a concern voiced about the Lenovo acquisition of Thinkpad. Personally, I am not worried a bit. In fact, it might be the best thing for Thinkpad.

I have personally talked to some of the Lenovo executives about the acquisition. Lenovo has been one of the biggest PC companies in China for some time, and they are deeply committed to be in the PC business. I think they will put the focus and investment into Thinkpad to allow it to really flourish. But, we will have to watch and see how they do…

Most people don’t realize, but almost all of IBM’s thinkpads have been built in China for several years. Most of them are built in a very modern facility in Shenzhen (just a few minutes from Hong Kong, on a good traffic day), which I happened to drive past this morning (I am on a business trip in China). That plant now has a shiny new “Lenovo” sign on it, Thinkpads are still rolling down the lines, and their employees say that nothing is really changing in the products.

As an aside, over 90% of all notebooks in the world are built in China now, mostly by ODM companies who build for many brands. Companies like Quanta, Asustech, etc who build for HP,. Sony. Even some Dells and thinkpads. In fact, Lenovo and Dell are the only big PC companies I can think of who still build most of their own laptops in their own factories in China.

The thinkpad design team in Japan was also part of the Lenovo deal, so I don’t expect there to be any problem with the designs going downhill either. For those people who have experienced overheating on laptops, it is almost purely a design issue, and no amount of “repair” can fix a bad design.

I worked for IBM for many years, and the pressure on the PC division to cut cost, reduce service, etc. was always pretty intense because they weren’t making the profits IBM expected. I really liked IBM, but IBM just couldn’t understand how to play in a low margin, high volume market like PCs. I often thought that Thinkpad succeeded more “despite” being in IBM than “because” it was in IBM. (I could tell you stories about some of the amazingly subversive tactics some IBM employees / teams had to use to defend their products and customers against idiotic directives from some IBM executives who couldn’t see past the quarterly financials…)

Dellman: what kind of crap is that: We are blackmailed into paying more to get acceptable service? I paid a fortune to get the at home service. But that wasn’t’ enough. I have to buy gold. The fact that gold srevice even exists is an admission that the rest of the service is tin. Therein lies Dell’s precise problem: We treat you like crap… unless you pay up. I know you come in with the best of intentions but that really gets my goat; it is the best indication of the worst of dell.

Customer service shouldn’t have “levels”. It should be first rate all the time for every customer. Any company that resorts to making their customers pay for good service deserves what it gets – loss of business. I was getting ready to buy a Dell, but not anymore. Sorry Dell, you snooze you lose.

I’ve also had problems with Dell service. Never mind that I have difficulty communicating with tech support people with thick foreign accents; they know less about my Dell than I do. When I call tech support, I’ve already research the knowledge base; in other words, calling tech support is a last resort. Yet, when I tell the tech that I am somewhat knowledgeable and need Level Two tech support. they cannot provide it.

I’ve had a new Dell Latitude x300 for about a year — my fourth Dell computer. The wireless card is defective and Dell refuses to acknowledge my troubles. The slough it off on my wireless router company. I’ve given up. My next machine will be another — as yet undetermined — brand; but it will not be a Dell.

Like I said, I’m not here to advertise for them. The fact is, you really need to run a big corporation to get the best service. We treat big businesses like gods because that’s where most of Dell’s money comes from. We’d rather lose a few customers who buy 1 or 2 systems a year than a huge business that spends a million dollars a week on our stuff.

I have 2 Dell desktops and 2 laptops and have never had any problems. The one time I needed customer service they were slow to respond, but I think my expectations have been lowered and I was not overly dismayed. I was actually amused by the service rep…”My name is Mahatma, but you can call me Michael”. Despite my own experience, I can’t ignore the clarity of the mesages listed here. I’m beginning to feel that I have been lucky and I am not inclined to trust my luck with Dell in the future.

I would love my voice to be heard as well….thank you for finally giving a voice to the DELL NIGHTMARE. Here is my letter to Dell outlining my list of issues:

Dell Customer Support –
OptiPlex GX260
Service Tag: 7P4GQ11

I purchased A Dell Otiplex in 8/5/2002 with the most expensive warranty in home warranty.

On 05/29/2003 it would no longer work.
From that point on over 50 calls or more were made to Dell.
I would say without exaggeration that we have spent over 100 hours dealing with this issue. These calls were incredibly frustrating. We were made to tear the computer part, take parts out, test different functions. We were hung up numerous times, Could not understand many of your technicians as their English was not very good; We were told that technicians would call us back – they did not. The list is endless in terms of our time spent and incredible frustration.

Two mother board were replaced- one on 9/21/2003 – another on 2/20/04.
At both times your in home technicians would not stay until windows booted up, saying that “we do not do software.”

When we tried to load the Windows System CD, it said a file was missing. Once again called technical support. They said the CD was bad and sent us a new one.
Received the CD and loaded Windows. This now is September of 2003.

We called Dell again (many different numbers – all technicians giving us different numbers)
I was told that no disks could be sent to us. I also had purchased windows XP Professional and was told that I would have to re-purchase this. (Unbelievable, is this really legal?)

I kept trying different avenues. Finally got a technician that said she would put all the files I needed on a list that I could download as no cd could be sent to me. The one caveat that they would only work if I saved them to a 3.5” disk. I asked her, “would they fit.” She said yes. When I saw the list of the files, I knew immediately that they were too big for a disk. How she could not know this being a technical support person is beyond me.

I then called again. The new person I got said he would send me a CD with the drivers.
We spent approx. 3-4 hours trying to load the drivers and get the computer to work.

We finally broke down and decided to try the DELL Customer Support Nightmare again. We got a hold of another technician and we were told we received the wrong CD for the wrong model of computer.

We still cannot use our computer.

Your company in my opinion has the absolute worst customer service I have ever experienced.

I would like at the very least my warranty extended to cover an additional 9 months. But what I would really like is a computer that works.

As I’ve talked to other Dell owners, I have heard similar nightmares from them as well. How you can run a company like this is amazing to me. When someone spends over $2000 for a computer and pays for the most expensive warranty because they NEED their computer to run a business, one would hope that when your computer malfunctions that you FIX IT!!! Not make the user go through absolute torture!

I bought my first Dell over nine years ago when Dell was small company and gave good quality service and I was able to speak to an American technician who spoked English that I could understand. The second Dell was seven years ago. but still I had good service. Then three years ago I bought this 8200 Dimension Dell and my troubles begans. I had major problems and the vaious people I spoked too couldn’t talk English that I could understand. Spent hours and hours on the telephone with various foreign technicians and supervisors with no results until I finally brought in a local PC techician at my own expense who once was a local ontsite technician for Dell. I spent another thousand dollars and I refurbished the new Dell computer with quality parts and now it runs pretty good without the help of Dell.

So Mr. Dell, I shall never buy another Dell product again. I have forewarned others not to buy Dell products, because of my troubles with Dell. Since you love foreign cheap labor, then that it is what we get, cheap computers with cheap unable to speak English speakers who live in India, Pakistan, or some other sing song country. (My name is Bob, may I help you. in a sing song tone. What kind of BS are you trying to prove.?)

Incidentally Mr. Dell, I understand you had to satisfied your big business customers with American quality technicians when they told you either American service technician, or no more business with your company. Trouble with your company Mr. Dell, you got to big for your britches and you wanted to cut cost by hiring cheap help in foreign countries; however, you are charging big time bucks for worthless service. The bell curve has caught up with you as it is now going down and hopefully your demise.

Bill

Someone should ask Michael Dell about the time that the president of Compuadd had the Austin Texas police come and remove him from the HQ building. I worked for Compuadd when that happened. It was hilarious. Michael Dell was an obnoxious used car salesman back then, and it appears that he hasn’t changed one bit. I have never bought a Dell, and never will, because of their Bangalor tech support, their inherent lack of quality, and the way they are ruining the entire US computer industry. Their servers suck, too. “Hardware problem? No, you have to reinstall Windows 2000 Server, then rebuild your entire SQL2000 Enterprise database from the ground up, then…” That was the last time that the company I used to work for bought Dell, and that was before I started working for them.

I only had to read 3 entries before it came to me. A blog just destroyed a huge company in a single shot.

I found it hilarious and scary.

I would like to destroy every company that has customer support farmed out to India.

Why? Because that’s where my job went.

What company should we target 1st to bring back our jobs?

My family has bought 6 or 7 Dells in the last 6 or 7 years for homes & business. And as I was deciding what to get to replace my circa 1999 Dell tower – the decision was going to be which higher-end Dell laptop I got – Jeff’s saga with Dell was going on at the same time. A bit of research into “switching” and a seriously fun trip to the local Apple store later, needless to say I’m writing this from my new iBook (and I am totally creeped out and NOT into the ‘Cult of Mac’ mindset). And needless to say, no one in my family – and probably in my circle of friends – will ever buy a Dell again. Ed, you really think a single blog post took down (you use the past tense) a company? Oh, please. It’s the story that was told, the consistent dismal and/or nonexistent response from the company, the fact that they refuse to listen to customers – even extremely high-profile customers – that’s leading to the slow, creeping terrible word-of-mouth that Dell is getting and will continue to get from this and similar incidents that will spell trouble for them. Dell revolutionized the industry, but they absolutely cannot survive on momentum from past successes alone if they put out mediocre-to-crappy products and are completely aloof. Word of mouth spreads exponentially but builds slowly & powerfully – and Dell may finally recognize that in a few quarters as more people talk, and more people get to the point of a purchase decision on a computer, and they do not choose a Dell.

I was in Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division working in an automations tent. At the time all the laptops we had over there were Dells. I decided then that they were pieces of crap. We were constantly replacing parts. A lot of guys were buying laptops on line, 2 people that I worked with purchased Dell’s online. I thought it was hillarious that both laptops were broken when they arrived. I bought a Sony vaio and am still happy with it 2 years later.

Addendum to previous comment:

MY COMPANY BUYS DELL GOLD LEVEL SUPPORT & THEY STILL TREAT US LIKE SH**!!!

So buying highly expensive support will do you no good if you are in DellHell

Dell has unbeleivably horrible customer support. My 2 year old laptop, still under warranty broke down. I called Dell, and the technician was barely listening to me, after 2 years this issue was unresolved and he said that he will be sending me a box and shipping label so that I can send it in to be repaird. Two weeks later, this box never came. I called Dell, again, and they had no record of this conversation taking place!!!

So, I had to spend an additional 2 hours with a new incompetent technican, again, the problem was unresolved, the technician told me he needs to talk to his supervisor on how to fix this problem and PROMISED to call be back within 20 minutes, of course I didn’t beleive him, so I asked for a phone number and name to call him back in case he doesnt uphold his promise- he wouldn’t give it to me AND HE NEVER CALLED ME BACK!!!

“Dude, you’r getting a Dell” has turned to “Dude, your getting a Disaster!!”

Dell sucks I am sharing my experince with my disatisfaction with Dell I saw a ad for inspiron 6000 notebook with free shipping within 2-3 days, so I decided to purchase one and placed the order on July 9th, I was charged $19 extra when I questioned it they the salesman (chester ) told me shipping is free the $19 is for handling. I went home and checked my email it said that my estimate shipping date is July 25th so went back to my salesman Chester and asked him about what happend to 2 to 3 days shipping he smiled and confidently said yes sir your note book will be shipped in 2-3 days AS SOON AS IS BULIT AND COMES TO DELLS WAREHOUSE which will be less than 2 two weeks, its 2-3days from the time it arrives to the warehouse I could not belive what I was hearing, I said what if I cancel my order he said he would gladly do it without even trying to opplolgize and save the sale, well deiced I am going to keep the order and take action through a different way and called dell to address this issue, when I called Dell I had to go through a series of teleprompt to get to the person and when I finally got a person I explained my situation Customer service person said let me transfer to the right person and transferred my call to the begining of telepromt. It happened 3 times I had to start from the begining to get an human being. I was tired and frustarted next time I used a different approach I called and punched the #s to buy a notebook its so so quick (of course when mr Dell wants your money) I asked the persons name and ID and then explained my problem he was nice As I had got him by his B–LS. he could not do much but atlest explained that, thats how it works said your note book should be arrived before the day they promissed, I asked him can I get it earlier and can wanted to talk to his supervisor guess where the call went guys yep went to INDIA, do you think I got the results you guessed it right NOOOOO, So I decied that I am going to tell all my friends and webloggers about my experience TO YOU MR DELL it works I had two of my friends who wanted to dell but decided against it just coz of me, I have deciced to tell the whole world about your acts.
I wish I had know buzz machine by jeff earliers I would have not bought dell
The store address is
DELL DIRECT
2601 PRESTON RD
FRISCO TX
972-712-5844

Since I’m known as the computer “geek” in my department at work, a friend came to me about her Dell problems. Seems that her computer at home stopped working (blue screen of death) so they called Dell Customer Service. A “very nice” woman from India told them that her hard drive had crashed and the only recourse was to have a tech come to their house and replace it. He would take her old hard drive with him could try to restore her data, but couldn’t guarantee it and it would cost $99. Naturally my friend was distraught about the possibility of losing all her files but felt she had no recourse other than to pay the $99.

I told her to call them back and ask for someone to walk her through reinstalling windows before she gave up her “broken” hard drive. After 3 hours of being transferred from one tech to another, she finally got someone to help her with this, and voilá, the computer worked and all her files were intact.

I was amazed at the bad advice she had received and how Dell found it to be easier to send a tech with a new hard drive than to just reinstall windows. Maybe “restoring data” for $99 is just another way to bring in revenue???

I am a lucky one. Corporate IT has the deal with Dell. So far my complaints with the current D600.

The system gets really hot. It is uncomfortable to work with.
2 harddrives later. IT tells me that they crash all the time
My Targus power supplies don’t work with it because Dell decided to put some sort of a chip into their power supplies to prevent 3rd party power supplies.

Now luckily I got IT to buy me a new IBM… make that Linevo :-) very nice. Wonder if anyone has a comparison between new Linevo’s and new Dell’s.

So far I am happy with my new ThinkPad.

Zoe

Welcome to computer hell in general. As consumers demand more for less and competition forces prices down, well, something has to give. Consumer-grade PC’s are spec’d to a pricing sweet-spot based on target market. Uh, that’s you-get-what-you-pay-for. Included in that calculus is customer service or lack thereof depending on your point of view.

Don’t blame Dell or any one else for trying to stay in business. Every company has customer service issues. I have also seen consumers expect the sun, the moon and the stars for as long as they live over a $500.00 computer. This is unrealistic.

Every consumer is ultimately responsible for the buying decision they make. All computers are not made the same. Matching specs is a waste of time unless you REALLY know what is under the hood. All computer companies do not operate the same. Understand not only what you are buying, but from whom.

Dell is ultimately a business computer company and from my perspective of 20+ years in the business, pretty good at it.

I personally wouldn’t own a Gateway if you gave it to me nor would I own any computer that is bundled in a box at Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club or any such place. I would also be disinclined to purchase a Dell from one of the flyers I get from them. Why? Because I understand the limitations and compromises placed on the manufacturer to get a product into a pricing sweet spot.

I’d recommend to anyone considering the purchase of any item of considerable monetary cost that they first revisit the concept of “value”. Secondly, remember that YOUR time has value. You can make more money, but you cannot get back time.

If that item is a computer, be realistic in what it’s primary function is going to be. A video card for gaming can cost more than an entire computer so don’t expect a low-end computer to play Half Life 2 well, if at all. It will also probably choke hard on any 3-D rendering engine such as AutoCAD. It will however, surf the Internet and do word processing and spreadsheets quite well.

Back in the early 90′s when my company built “white-box” computers for resale (I am in private consultancy-only practice now), we used to joke that no matter what it said on the box, all parts came from the same garage in Taiwan. It is still not that for from the truth.

I dont want to defend cheap PCs, but even for $500 you still should get decent machine and support.
I wouldnt buy a cheap laptop, because I expect it to work flawlesly.
But hey, maybe I am wrong maby we shouldnt expect too much of machines for $2000 or more.
Why dont we just hand Dell our money and then we wouldnt have to deal with poor quality of their products and ridiculous customer support. I am gonna think about it…

I work for the Air Force in a computer support shop, and we have been using old dells for a while. They seem to function well enough, but time has come to upgrade. Thanks for your informative blog on the degrading quality of dells product, we will not be using dell this upgrade if at all possible.

I would like to say the same thing about Dell and their customer sevice. I bought a Dell Digital Jukebox back in June 2004 and everything ran smooth with it until January of 2005 and then it started to freeze up. I called Dell and since it was still under warrenty they sent me a refurbished Dell or a “used” one. Now it is August and there is a internal hard disk problem with my Jukebox. I have tried to call Dell several times and I either get transfered or they tell me that they will call me back and they never have. They told me that the best thing to do is buy and new one. Did I not read that the reason that Micheal Dell started his company was to give the customer what they wanted?

Thanks so much for giving me a place to rant!

I sent the following message from support.dell.com to BOTH technical and non-technical issue email addresses on 12/30/03. I’ve gotten no response. Obviously, we’ve given up and now use a ThinkPad while the Dell laptop collects dust.

Service tag: 8J13421
Express Service code: 18564940873
Order/Invoice number: 171852438

Our Inspiron 2650 laptop computer (model no PP04L) has not functioned properly in over a month, despite repeated calls to technical support and sending the system to be serviced. It essentially dies – no video, no sound, no fan, etc – and will not power back on. Sometimes taking the battery out and putting it back in gets it to power on normally but then the same thing will happen again within a few days. Eventually it would not power on EVER and we had to send it in because the troubleshooting over the phone was leading nowhere. At this point, we have a laptop that is unreliable and quite frustrating to deal with even though we still have several payments left since it was a $1500 machine!

I am frankly not content with the service I have received from Dell so far, and this is especially maddening because the reason we chose to purchase from Dell to begin with is the reputation of good service. The technical support seems to just want to get off the phone as quickly as possible without confirming that the problem has been fixed – this is based on 6 separate calls. The instructions given for airborne express to send the system were unclear and resulted in an extra week of waiting. The service team seemed a bit dishonest in its dealings – accusing first that something was spilled on the system based on the discoloration found on the motherboard and that we would have to pay $699 for them to repair the system. I know that nothing was spilled on this system. Any discoloration on the motherboard could be from manufacturing or from the natural condensation in the air or almost anything. Upon challenging this accusation, the person I spoke with came back telling me that actually the service team was able to fix the system by reseating the memory. It seems to me this troubleshooting should have been done before coming to the conclusion that the motherboard needed to be replaced. In any case, I was assured that the appropriate reliability testing was done to ensure the system would operate normally. After receiving the system, it worked properly for 5 days before having the same exact symptom as before. I again called technical support. While on the phone I took the battery out and replaced it, and this booted the system up. I was instructed how to run the Extended diagnostics and did so. The results showed NO errors… so all the hardware “appears” to be functioning normal. The system worked for 6 days. It is now dead again, and we are requesting from DELL a laptop computer that is reliable. This system was not inexpensive, and we have an express warranty/support contract. I look forward to learning how you are going to accomplish this.

Ditto! I ordered a Dell Axim about 2 years ago now on the strength of a money-saving bundled accessories coupon. I submitted the correct paperwork for the rebate THREE times, and each time the paid-to-ignore contract folks said we don’t have it. I FINALLY copied every danged thing, made a list of all my conversations, with date, time, names and what transpired, and wrote a letter to the general counsel of Dell. It didn’t even hit somebody’s desk before they called me, at home, in the evening, to ask how much the rebate should be. It’s too bad it had to come to that before they would bother to honor their rebate commitment.

Is Dell Financial customer support farmed out to India? Can’t seem to get anyone who I can understand or is knowlegable about my problem. They pulled a fast one on me and I thought I was getting a Dell for no interest until 2006. I hope Dell finds it’s way onto 60 minutes someday. If I did not pay so much for it I would fly down to Texas and throw it through the fucking front window just to express my dissapointment. I will however place “return to sender” on all the correspondence they send me trying to screw me over again.

I want to rant about Dell’s recent TV commercial that featured a “white,” clearly American customer service rep answering the phone in the customer service center while it was dark outside. Give me a break! This was an obvious case of false and misleading advertising! What Dell customer support is this?? When I have called Dell’s customer service, I get some “international” call center with individuals who barely could speak and understand English, and who were barely capable of even understanding the technical problem with my Dell Inspiron laptop. Why don’t they advertise this reality. I bought Dell products for years, based largely on its incredible customer service. Today, I wouldn’t buy a Dell computer because the company has destroyed its brand and ruined its identity as a great customer service company. Wake up Dell, you are cutting your own throat with your current crappy, “outsourced” customer service.

Dell had great customer service during 1998-early 2003. I have dell desktop, laptop, 2 Dell Axim. I was thinking of buying a Plasma tv from Dell before this problem i am having dell. After what is happening with my laptop right now, i will never buy any dell products again. My next laptop will be either IBM, Sony or Apple.

Also why do you have to go for the gold contract when you want to talk to someone in the States. If you want to sell your computers we deserve to get the support you should be providing without paying through the nose for it. WE ARE AMERICANS buying your computers.

Say Company A and Company B sells a computer for almost the same price, and the computer look alike. How would a comsumer pick between these 2 companies? Customer services, Right? Say then, Company A went from excellent customer service to wrost customer service. Would a customer still buy company A’s customer? I think NOT.

Company A is Dell. Company B is Sony, IBM, Apple, etc.

It’s time to move on: Good bye Dell.

Brooklyn, NY…

Back before I retired (IT professional), some other people in the IT dept. had an acronym for DELL: Doesn’t Even Last Long. No real problem with my Dell Dim. 4700, other than the 2 front USB ports are dead..called their Tech Line…no help there (unit still under warranty). I found a few posts on one of Dell’s forums on similar USB port problems…no help there. Beginning to wonder if I made the right choice…if they can’t/won’t fix such a small problem, what happens if I have a big one?

There was a time when my hubby and I would not consider anything but a Dell computer. Sadly, over time that has changed. Over time we heard the quality of Dell reportedly was not good.

I broke down and bought a Dell laptop because of a special deal I could get. I also purchased extended support for it. Everything went well until I had to contact Dell support. Our conversations were totally ineffective because I couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand me. This went on for 3 days, with each person trying to pass me off to someone else and me waiting in que lines to speak to someone I couldn’t understand who couldn’t understand me.

I bitterly complained to Dell. Who wants 3 years of techical support from someone in India still working on their English skills. Probably wouldn’t be bad if it were a social conversation, but not what I want in tech support! Did they hear me? I doubt it.

my experience with “dell hell” included windows. i needed to install sp2, so downloaded and installed it. during the installation my dell locked up. was able to unlock and tried it again after going to windows site and printing out info on “installing sp2″. had to do this because Microsoft “customer service” said that all the information i needed was on the site. printed out the info, tried it again and again locked up. called Microsoft “customer service” and they said since my dell came with windows already loaded, that i needed to call dell. i called dell and they said since it was a windows problem i needed to call windows. while this was going on, my computer was useless and i lost valuable work time. i almost threw the dell out the window but the systems manager from my husbands company came over and worked some magic and got my computer working. however, i haven’t installed sp2 and i’m not going to. this is my 3rd dell and i will probably upgrade my computer in a year or two but i guarantee it won’t be a dell, and i may go to apple since i’m so disgusted with microsoft.

I’m torn now. My family’s last three desktops have been Dell computers. When I buy a new one, my current gets handed down to my brother who hands his down to my mother (who has the least need for performance and speed), and I was about to buy Dell again.

I’ve rarely had to call Dell – the last time was in 2003, for a dead DVD drive. The tech I spoke to was in the U.S., listened to the troubleshooting I’d tried (and didn’t make me do it all again), recognized that I knew what he was going for when we went in the box to swap cables so didn’t talk to me like a novice, and when we confirmed it was the drive rather than the cables, had a new drive sent to me within a few days.

But things can change in two years. I guess I have to decide whether to rely on my own (but dated) experiences or anecdotal (yet more recent) stories from hell…

I’ve had the pleasure(!!) of using various laptops over the past few years, and but for Compaq, Dell would have taken the honors in terms of user unfriendliness and poor build quality.

Consider this: the volume control buttons only work when you are logged in and at the desktop (not even when the desktop is locked). What prevents Dell from rewiring those to the BIOS so that volume can be controlled in any OS/state as long as the system is powered up (look at how IBM handles it. They even have the display brightness work at hardware level).

Or just press the laptop lid gently and u can see outlines of your fingers on the display.

Kvetching apart, this post seems like a lesson to each and every corporation, American or not, tech or not, to take customers *seriously*. Unless you are a state monopoly in middle-of-nowhere in Afrika, customers are the ones who make or break your revenue numbers and they are your major ‘stakeholders’. Keep customers happy and the cash registers would keep on ringing. Time for some Business 101s, eh?

PS: To set the record state, I did have problematic keyboard in a Dell notebook I used for a while. Had to call the customer support 2-3 times, and go thru the rigmarole of “Boot into DOS mode, press keys.. bla bla”, but managed to talk them into sending me a replacement keyboard. The delltech was there next day, and he fixed it in 5 mins flat. I guess I was one of the lucky ones :-)

I am all for helping out 3rd World Countries, I personally own a gallery/ shop that is sweatshop free product. I have seen the 60 Minutes shows on how farming out Customer Service to India is assisting them in getting out of poverty. They seem to be working so hard at losing their accents and their efforts are admirable. But at what cost domestically?

I called Dell last year to inquire about computers, and of course it was re-routed to India. I decided even tho the woman was lovely that if I am going to drop $1500 on a system I want to understand EXACTLY what I am getting. How irriating this barrier was with that issue but also, I felt like I was having a technical conversation 6000 miles away!

We have our own CS reps here in North America that are now unemployed due to outsourcing. It irritates me that at the end of the day, Mr. Dell isn’t employing overseas companies out of the goodness of his heart, but rather appeasing his shareholders and their bottom lines, needing unrealistic returns in an economy that has flat inflation rates by saving $. Ug. What a quandry. Or is it one?

Company after company are looking to overseas production at a cost to North American workers needing to make more than 4 cents a day. In our house we have a litany of products that we just don’t buy (Nike, Wal Mart shopping) because we don’t support their business models.

Dell Hell is unneccessary because at the end of the day your customer service people are your front lines. HP has similar problems ( my folks bought a lap top in Canada, took it to Arizona on their trip and the CS team there refused to receive the product defective because it wasn’t purchased in the States? please!) All companies have hellish responses now, and if you look at the quantity of product being produced, I am sure their Returns are not as high. Let this blog be a lesson to Big Business: we have outlets to communicate now, more powerful than the Ralph Naders.
Listen, be receptive to your customers, not shareholders. Be a leader in Technical Support (they say you can make the best impression with a customer during a RETURN).
LISTEN!!!

staci

UK Customers, address for communication with DELL Direct is Boghall Road, Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland …Bracknell HQ a waste of time!
Telephone + 353 1 286 0500
Have a contact name: Janeann Dempsey, Executive Support Team, Dell Computer Corporation.

Anyone with a DELL wishing to contact me about their technical issues, no strings attached – I may be able to assist, but NO promisses, simply e-mail as much detail as possible to your issues to mailbox@blue2ict.com

Confused,

I always buy Dell and would always recommend them, never had a problem and none of my friends have either, the question is will you allow pro Dell customer have a say, I have had 4 Dells in 8 Years and cannot fault either there Customer service or quality.

As consumers are we being to greedy, I realise it is good to keep corporates on their toes, but at the end of the day we are all in the business of selling something and how would we like it if we did the best we could and then were torn apart on a blog.

There has to be an element of realism in dealin with large corporate companies.

We just received our new Dell, minus any back-up disc should we need to reinstall anything. Dell claims that you can request these cd’s.
(see)
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=sw_mediaexp&message.id=1895

Seems you will only get these if you buy the more expensive models.
email support told me to call customer support. Customer support told me I couldn’t have the cd’s.

If you go to this website:
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kb/en/document?dn=1091713

You are instrusted on how to make a backup CD. I don’t have this tool evidently and this is a brand new computer.
Dell must think that the hard drives are immune to crashes ore serious problems since they claim all you need is on a seperate partion and the “helpful” tech will assist you in retrieving information on a broken/sick hard drive.
I’ve had hard drives completely erased after power surges in our area.
What idiot came up with the “Dell through the rules of the Media Reduction Initiative” and the need to make customers ask for something which was clearly paid for?
My next complaint is delivery, all we have gotten so far is the CPU. When I check with the UPS tracking service to find out where the monitor is at it says that “THE SENDER HAS REQUESTED A HOLD AND WILL PICKUP AT A UPS FACILITY. UPS WILL HOLD FOR PICKUP FOR 5 BUSINESS DAYS”
What is up with that?
And why does a printer need to take so long in production? God only knows when it will show up. So much for 3-5 day shipping.
This is our third Dell and each time I have to deal with customer service Ijust want to scream.
This definetly will be our last Dell system.

Following is a letter I have sent to Michael Dell and his vice president Michael George. I will have to wait and see what happens if anything.

Date: September 2, 2005

Problem: Dell Inspiron 8600 (purchased December 03)

The PCMCIA port on my laptop died again. This is now the third time this has happened. I use this laptop for business and now feel that I can no longer trust it. After finally reaching a supervisor in corporate headquarters, I felt maybe the problem would be fixed. What I wanted to do was replace this laptop with another brand that Dell sells; we would even pay a difference. He would not even consider this. I am totally disappointed with the managers views and I am hoping that maybe you can help us.

First, we use a specialized PCMCIA card called a 1784-PCMK card from Allen-Bradley and we use the card in the Dell to connect to industrial processors.

My business partner has the same laptop and his motherboard has had to be replaced twice already.

I explained to your manager that we know other people that have other brands of laptops and have had no problems and his professional recommendation was maybe we need to buy from another company if we are having so many problems with Dell.

I explained to him that my company has bought many computers from Dell and soon will need 5 more; his attitude still was there was nothing more he would do besides replacing the motherboard again. I went on and told him that besides buying only Dell computers, we recommend Dell to our customers and as a result a lot of them now buy from Dell. His attitude of helping us still did not change.

I tried to explain that we have other Dell computers that have never had a problem using the PCMK card. His recommendation was maybe I need to use one of our old laptop computers; in this case it was a 3500.

I tried to explain that service techs have told us that they have replaced many motherboards on the 8600 for similar problems. He told me this was the first that he had heard of it.

This particular laptop has voltage problems when using the PCMCIA slot. I know it for a fact and I do believe Dell is aware of this problem but may be looking at the cost factor instead of customer satisfaction.

I have always in the past been a loyal Dell customer and hopefully in the future will again be a loyal customer once this problem has been resolved.

If you people would just learn to speak Indian, you might finally get some descent service from Dell.

Taylor: just what kind of service are you providing your customers if you give them crappy products to start out with? Customer service starts with the sale, not when you pick up the phone because something has gone wrong.

I am in my own terrible version of dell hell. I composed a letter which i would like to send to some high ranking dell execs, including michael dell. can you help me acquire these e-mail addresses? Many thanks.

I am having similar problems with a Dell computer. Nobody in Dell listens to what I say (no replies to my lawyer, either). I’ve spent hours on the phone calling their “award winning customer service”. Sent many letters. What I got? False promises and a broken computer to keep!

I am about to give up fighting with them and starting a blog – just like you did. At least future Dell customers (if there going to be any) will avoid problems by reading these blogs.

Looking for a quality VFM Laptop, consider an ASUS …visit the website

Global:
http://www.asus.com.tw/products.aspx?l1=5

United Kingdom:
http://uk.asus.com/products1.aspx?l1=5

Hello Everyone:

I have a small business and recently purchased a Dell desktop. I admit that I am not very computer savvy. I needed to speak to tech support a few times and had terrible luck. I decided to cut bait and send the machine back. I was told that I would be charged a 10% re-stocking fee. I accepted. I shipped the machine back and now am finding out that my amount due is not the 10% re-stocking amount but that amount plus the sales tax I paid plus the original shipping costs. I have been on the phone since 6:30 p.m. trying to find out why I am being charged more than the 10% amount I had been quoted.
I am now on hold with customer service (again) and just asked to speak to a supervisor. I am still holding (49 minutes) and it is 9:45 p.m. Oh wait, I think I am getting through. No, I have now been switched into the tech support line. Still holding, 54 minutes and counting. I guess I will call the headquarters tomorrow and try to receive some help.
For what it is worth, I originally had an IBM and for some reason decided to switch to a Dell. I have had good luck with the IBM tech support and hopefully will continue to receive that same type of service on the new IBM/Lenovo I just purchased. I wish you all good luck.
p.s. By the way, 59 minutes and no tech support. Oh yeah, I didn’t want to speak to them anyway.

I have the email address for Michael Dell. michael_dell.com

I have been going nuts with the harrassing phone calls and now I send him an email for each call I receive. So far this a.m., 5 calls and 5 emails! I told him I will bombard him with an email for each call.

I know it won’t matter to him, but I can at least feel that I am doing something!!

Pat Wheeler

Hi
Thanks for all of the info. I’m writing this on my husband’s Toshiba Tecra since my Dell 1150 is dead. The power cord is in and shows green but the computer battery light shows yellow for a few seconds when I try to turn it on then dies too. I’m sure the warranty is up too. Any ideas??….besides, of course, never buying one again. I have no idea how to test another power cord to make sure it’s not a problem with that instead of the computer.

Dell,DEll,DEll…if only someone pulled my coat to you B4 i spent $700 opn a P4 Dim-i’ll start w/ Ink,of the Black type, which, according to your Ink Meter, was only 3/4 empty, but refused to print anymore,even after i set the Prefs for Darkest-all the wasted time E-mailing u for advise or a reason why-all the un-pronounceable names that said ‘We rec’d your E-mail, and the Ref # is…’ 12 different Ref #-you couldent even respond or refer to to my original E-mail-your ‘Techs’ referred me to ‘Microsoft Solution Center’ Doc #’s-that did’nt even refer to ink prob’s!-But my latest “DELL”- my system re-boots itself when it is sitting idle- I will not bore u w/ how many ref’s to ‘MS Sol Ctr’ doc’s, $ how many ‘The person who responded to your E-mail is not available, I will be assisting you-my name is (insert constanants here) (no, I am not racest) Thanx for the Vent…

Mr. Jarvis:

I have been DELL”D

I have just finished my last conversation with the bullies from LTD Financial Services-it of course, ended in a heated screaming match-all o ver my DELLHELL experience.

I, too, spent countless hours trying to find one person who spoke fluent English-without an accent and was not stationed in India! I found that to be an impossibility. As I left the santuary of church this morning pondering whether the the big bullies from LTD would begin their harrassment of me and demand “I take a pen and write my name to a check or”, I’m not sure what the else was to be. I do know that I’ve spent this last half year in pursuit of obtaining the coveted address of the president of Dell. For days and hours-of which adding all the hours and calculating wages thereof, I could have purchased multiple units of Dell-I spent methodically searching for someone who would even listen to my plea. No one is equipped to take any responsibility as far as consumer satisfaction and no one person is going to let out the coveted address or name of Mr. President Dell.

I was sent a model that was lemon, or a dud, or a stripped down model of some semblance of a viable computer. Upon calling DELL I was assured by someone posted in India that I would be sent a part to make my computer viable for all sorts of needs including floppy disks. Plus the rebate to be sent to me of upwards close to $140.00 was never sent. Again I was assured that this would be taken care of and sent to me.

But after the computer crashed four times and I was assured that it was not Dell’s fault, I spent countless hours with Adelphia to correct the problem, only to find that the crashes were definitely due to the Dell computer. So, I consulted and hired two computer experts, one finally gave up in making the system work and told me that even if the part to be sent came, the system could’nt accept it because the computer was sent with no area inside to adapt to floppy disks or anything else- in other words I could not add on to the computer over time if and when I needed.

But it “DELLHELL’ still goes on… When I first called DELL in the first 30 days, I had stated that I wanted to return the unit, but they were so amicable then, and said no don’t do that because they were sure the parts were adequate in bringing the computer to the level I needed. So, you guessed it, I decided to wait because I thought this was a company of “Award-Winning Service and Support”! Now the time alloted to return the computer had elapsed and I was informed that even though my problems were within the first 30 days it was too late to return the computer without the charge of $100, because now it was passed the 30 day time alloted. I had been duped to believing DELL would indeed be my friend and guide me through this unfortunate experience.

I did send payment in full to what I felt was more than adequate for the computer sent and the time spent to track people to talk with, and for the part/s that never came and the rebate that never materialized-this check was marked in full satisfaction and accord and DELL had no trouble in cashing it. I did this with Dell’s financial services’ employee who had assured me once again that would take care of everything. I now realize that was just their DELL way to get payment. I do have a copy of the check. I had truly hoped this would solve the financial problem at least, and prove that I was willing to pay if someone would help. All that happened was that I was again duped into believing their lies. I was manipulated into believing DELL would support me especially if I showed true faith in holding my end of the deal. Dell has no conscience and believes they are above the law when dealing with unsatisfied customers and inadequate computers.

One other vitally important matter, when I had first mentioned all my problems to a DELL representative of their consumer financial department they actually stated “well that’s not our fault”- in other words give us your money even if the product you got was a lemon and we lied in our representations to you, and lied willfully to snare you into a DELL web of unconscionable levels of fraud to its consumers. Further, they will continue to wreak havoc on your life and threaten to destroy your credit and send bullies from the jungle to impede on any happiness you might have in a days time!!-All for the almighty “dollar”, that the majority of DELL employees can’t even pronounce correctlly.

There are still so many convoluted tales untold in my saga but I have grown weary and will close my lamentation. But I will say that I’ve begun a Better Business complaint. I am also writing a Wall Street Journal editorial so all of America can share in the true knowledge of a deceitful company that not only doesn’t deserve its self-proclaimed title of superior service, but most importantly uses fraudulent marketing to snare its “victims”!

Mr. Jarvis and all who have been Dell’d-Thanks for your ear!

I have six Dells. And, I must say, over the early part of my experience with Dell, I was very satisfied and impressed with their quality and especially their customer service.

However, I am a changed man. Little by little, incrementally, they’ve gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket. They really blew it when they outsourced their tech support to India. No matter how the Bangalore companies try to train their techs, the accents are often impenetrable, the timing of their verbal responses is so weird and their tone and attitude can be supercilious and insulting to say the very least. I’ve been given such incorrect and harmful advice by these techs that I currently don’t call them, I’ve found a local IT company to service my machines at my expense. So, Dell you’ve “saved money”.

Recently, like a damned fool, I bought a Dell server and a Dell Desktop. And I put the desktop on a Dell Financial Services “Preferred Account” whatever the hell that means. Now let’s be clear: I’ve been buying Dell for over ten years. I owned Dell stock, for gosh sake. I am known as an ‘early payer’ in all my accounts. Somehow, the last payment we sent in seems to have hit the snail in snailmail. It hasn’t gotten to them on time. The payment due was $27 dollars. We sent a check for $200 at the beginning of last week. So with a ‘past due’ or “delinquent” amount of $27, the geniuses in Bangalore had some gal with a thick accent and a nasty attitude call me at 7pm on Sunday night! When I told her we’d sent a check, she became abusive.

So, today, I called in, spoke to a ‘supervisor’ and obtained the total buyout amount and have just mailed them a check. And that’s the last money that Dell will ever get from me.

go to this URL: http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/biographies/en/msd_index?c=us&l=en&s=corp
which is Michael Dell’s bio on the Dell website. I love the quote, “…the company he founded in 1984 with $1,000 and an unprecedented idea — to build relationships directly with customers.”

Boy have they lost their sense of direction!

Goodby, Michael Dell. Have a nice life.

It seems Dell’s policy is once we got your money good luck getting help from us. They have had my laptop for over 2 weeks and they still can’t tell me where it is or when I’ll get it back. I would like to write to Michael George where did you send your letter?
I posted a comment on Dell’s community site and in a few hours they took it down because they said it HTML in it which is bull, but in those few hours I got many replies from people with customer service problems.

Does anybody know if I sue them in small claim court where I should serve them?

I WILL NEVER EVER BUY ANYTHING FROM DELL AGAIN AND I WILL STOP ANYONE I KNOW FROM DOING THE SAME. FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS GET DELL.

NO MORE DELL LIES!!! NO MORE DELL!!!

A recent message of mine to Dell.

Thank you Sir, but I went through this very same response and requests after the FIRST cancellation. Phone calls, dialing menus for this and that, going on hold. Nice people, promise to help, promise to get personally involved. Then I wait a week for the product and it gets canceled again. No calls, no explanations. NOTHING. I know how big corporations are. You’ve proven you can’t handle a fan replacement in weeks, AT LEAST! Why on earth should I invest more time on the phone, with the same people and department that have wasted weeks of my time with empty promises and conflicting information?

What will make your system not cancel my order again?? NOTHING! Your system can’t handle this fan. The same thing will happen again and Dell won’t care. Only I will care. I need a fan, Dell only needs new customers.

WHY ON EARTH DO YOU CANCEL ORDERS FOR THE SECOND TIME AFTER ALL THOSE PROMISES AND YOU DON’T EVEN CALL OR EMAIL ME????? This is a HORRIBLE thing to do to a loyal customer! This is a BAD system that cancels time and again without someone stepping in to help.

YOU ARE CUSTOMER SERVICE, YOU HAVE MY CODES, AND YOU CAN’T EVEN LOOK UP WHAT IS WRONG OR JUST GET ME A FAN? I TAKE THE TIME TO WRITE, BUT GET NOWHERE. WHY IS THE BURDEN STILL ON ME TO WORK THIS OUT???? I’VE DONE MY PART–TWICE!!

NO, YOU SAY, I MUST TAKE MORE OF MY TIME AND TRUST DELL TO SOMEHOW FIGURE OUT ALL THESE PROBLEMS. This is MORE proof that Dell has a bad system–they take the EASY way for Dell and put all the work on the CUSTOMER!!

MEANTIME, THE WEB IS LITTERED WITH POOR CUSTOMERS LIKE ME WHO CAN’T GET PARTS FROM DELL, JUST APOLOGIES AND PROMISES, PROMISES AND APOLOGIES.

DO A SEARCH YOURSELF. PEOPLE EVERYWHERE SAYING DELL CAN’T REPLACE DELL PARTS MORE THAN A YEAR OR TWO OLD. DO A WEB SEARCH, YOU’LL SEE! WHY DID I EVEN BOTHER A SECOND TIME???? I KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN. I DEAL WITH COMPANIES EVERY DAY AND I COULD TELL.

IMAGINE IF I DO AS YOU SAY AND TRY AGAIN AND THE SAME THING HAPPENS! IMAGINE HOW I’D FEEL!? I DON’T WANT TO FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT FOR LETTING DELL FOOL ME THREE TIMES!!!!!!!!!!

ONCE I HAD THE BEST THINGS ONLY TO SAY ABOUT DELL. NOW I HAVE NO FAITH IN DELL. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAVE MY 8100. I THINK I SHOULD JUST GET A NEW MACHINE FROM SOMEBODY ELSE.

YOU WERE #1 FOR TOO LONG. YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU USED TO. I NEED A COMPANY REALLY WANTS TO KEEP CUSTOMERS AND THAT CAN SHIP A PART WHEN THEIRS FAIL THEIR CUSTOMERS. GOOD FANS DON’T EVEN DIE AFTER FOUR YEARS. BUT AT LEAST IT BEAT YOUR HARD DRIVE. THAT DIED AFTER TWO!!

JUST SEND ME THE FAN, OVERNIGHT, FIND ONE — AND OVERNIGHT IT. ANY COMPANY CAN HANDLE THIS. THIS IS NOT HARD!!!!!! HOW BAD IS DELL THAT YOU CAN’T HANDLE FAN! FOR SHAME!!

IF YOU CAN”T, SEND THIS RIGHT UP THE CORPORATE LADDER, RIGHT TO THE VERY TOP IF NEED BE, BUT GET SOMEBODY WHO DOES HAVE THE “TOOLS” AND KNOWS HOW TO SOLVE A BASIC PROBLEM. DON’T ASK ME TO DO DELL’S WORK FOR THEM. I HAVE TRUSTED DELL AND DELL HAS FAILED ME. HOW DARE DELL ASK ME TO CALL AGAIN OR LIFT A FINGER AT THIS POINT. YOU SHOULD BE EAGER TO DO SOLVE THIS EASY PROBLEM AND LET ME HAVE SOME PEACE. SOMEONE OF THE THREE WHO PROMISED ME AS MUCH SHOULD ALREADY HAVE TAKEN CARE OF THIS!!! DELL PROMISES MEAN NOTHING TO ME NOW.

JUST SEND ME THE FAN, OVERNIGHT, FIND ONE — SOMEWHERE ON THIS EARTH AND OVERNIGHT IT.

OTHERWISE I DON’T NEED DELL. EVER! I WILL THROW THIS 8100 FROM MY ROOF AND LAUGH!! I WILL SHARE MY STORY WITH EVERYONE!!! THERE ARE OTHER VERY GOOD PEOPLE WHO MAKE COMPUTERS!!!!

THEY WOULD LOVE TO HAVE MY BUSINESS FROM DELL!!!!!

GOOD DAY!

Oh dear Mr Michael Dell, roll up your sleaves, get stuck in and sort out these DELL dissatisfied soles, who have paid their hard earned dues for a wholly crap service.
BEWARE your nice contracts with UK Government Departments, NHS, Education etc., may soon be in jeopardy when they find they discover the monster embraced!
Ignore your customers at your peril, although I expect your millions re safely stashed away before the crash!

Where is the Monitor I paid 1,314 GBP for way back in February 1994?

I have had the unfortunate problem of being burden by the company that I supported for so many years when I complained of my high interest rate that I requested be reduced. Within two weeks my next invoice was sent to me increasing my interest rate to over 30%. It seems that because Dell is losing its market share it is allowing Dell Financial Services to make up for its shortfalls. My wife and I have been dell customers since 1999, but we plan on paying off our terribly financed loan from DFS and never go back to Dell again.

Below is a copy of the email I sent to Dell and it’s response from one of their customer service reps…

My email complaint: “I am looking for a lower interest rate… this is the second PC I’ve purchased from Dell and I’ve been making regular payments with little or no issues… I don’t feel like a preferred customer. I want it lowered… I’ve had a good experience with Dell but I’d hate to stop being a customer due to your practices at DFS. If it is not favorable I will pay off my account within a month or two and never purchase another Dell. I look forward to your answer.”

Their response: “Dear Mr Copeland,

Thank you for contacting Dell Financial Services (DFS) regarding your account.

Please be advised that the interest rate offered to you was strictly based on your credit report. Additionally, this decision was processed by a computer generated scoring model, for your privacy and security, and unfortunately, is not negotiable.

Please keep in mind that with the Dell Preferred Account, all customers are provided a 25-day grace period on any new purchase. There are no annual fees, no down payments and no initiation fees. There are no minimum purchases required, you can make additional purchases at any time and there is never a penalty for paying off balances early.

As of today’s date, your current account balance is $XXXX.XX. Keep in mind, however, that because interest accrues on your account daily, you may have additional finance charges assessed on your next regular statement. Our records indicate a minimum payment of $XX.XX due by 10/03/2005.

To make a payment over the phone, please contact our collections department at (800) 443-1592. Please keep in mind that there is a $10.00 fee for this service. You may also mail your payment to:

Dell Preferred Account
Payment Processing Center
PO Box 6403
Carol Stream IL 60197-6403

Please refer to your 19-digit account number on your payment and have your check payable to Dell Preferred Account.

If you have not already, we invite you to visit our new and improved website at http://www.dellfinancialservices.com. We now provide a variety of account information including balance, available credit, and the date and amount of your last payment received. You can even update your billing address online as well.

Of course, should you have any other questions regarding your account that are not addressed by our website, please do not hesitate to contact us at (800) 283-2210 or respond by return e-mail. We will be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Shirley Mayrose
Customer Support
Dell Financial Services L.P.

Thanks for nothing, Shirley (oh maybe I should be thankful for the rate hike)! When there customer service takes a dive it is very evident in every aspect of the “Dell Family”. By the way, I am working my way up through middle management very quickly at our educational institution (which has a contract with Dell) I will make sure my institution here’s of this blog and all of the dissatisfied customers – most of all me! Have fun on the slippery slope!

Bruce Copeland
A Very Dissatisfied Customer

Nancy …
Display probems …have encountered this problem before …consistent with Grahics Chip or Motherboard routing (defective component soldering) almost certainly Hardware related …exactly which Plant does DELL originate?
Latop, try an ASUS!

By the way, if anyone has ideas on getting my issues resolved with a Dell Inspiron Laptop that I have never been able to use because it has never worked properly, please email me. I am in dire straights here and am looking for suggestions. Thanks! Susan ctadsc2@ocnjcc.org

Take it easy, for every dissatisfied dell customer, there is one for HP, Compaq, IBM, etc. No matter what blogs, press & media, you think you have influenced with your story, I am sorry to say you’re not making a difference.

Ever heard of compaqsucks.com? It’s been around for years. Do you think people buy less compaqs because of this site? Not a chance. A few kids got together and thought they would put ‘em outta business by making a site about how much they suck! Good luck…

We are also unsatisfied Dell customers. We have purchased previous Dell products with little to no problems, however the purchase of the Dell Dimension XPS last October was the exception. Within five months the hard drive and the monitor crashed. After numerous hours on the phone, the hard drive was dispatched by a technician, who installed it and walked away. A refurbished monitor was send. Five months later the hard drive crashed again. Once again, it was hours and hours on the phone with Dell before I finally got someone to replace the tower – and of course, they only would replace it with a refurbished one. The monitor had a few problems, but continued to work. Approximately 3 to 4 weeks later, a replacement tower arrived and was set up. Within 24 hours we were having problems with it. It was losing time, freezing up, and moving very slowly. I spent all day on the phone with Dell Saturday. They had me move a jack because they said when it was built it was put in the wrong place, they had me download a patch, etc., etc. and the problem continued and then the monitor finally crashed. Technical support assured me that a battery (which they think is the problem) and a monitor would be dispatched. I called them today, the battery has been dispatched, but the monitor dispatch was cancelled, so I had to spend another hour on the phone with them. (And this was after leaving messages all day that still have not been returned). It’s a shame I can not bill Dell for my time on the phone with them because of their product – I know I have at least 60 to 70 hours logged already, let alone the costs to have a computer technician keep setting up my system. I am very disappoined with Dell’s products and service. I have filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, but from what I read, my complaint is the same as they are getting from lots of others – product problems, technical support problems, and long extended waits on the phone. I hope that consumers will consider my complaint as well as the many listed above before they deal with Dell. We bought their best product, and it has been a NIGHTMARE.

I have had 7 dell computers all but the current one have been great. Any problems have been taken care of by Dell Tech Support over the phone. My current unit a XPS GEN 4 developed a problem which the Tech spent an hour with me to correct the problem. It was decided to have a Tech sent to my home to correct the problem. The next business day on site in my opinion is a myth. The third party support cannot even do next business week. It was two weeks before the third party could schedule me in. In other words I had a $5000 paper weight on my desk. I was able to fix the problem myself in this case by reseating the memory sticks. Dell must get a handle on their 3rd party service or others like myself will be going to another brand for the next purchace. I must say the Dell Techs were very courteous and helpful and one even told me I was not the first to complain about the 3rd party service.

I too have been through Dell Hell. As a college student, I was frustrated that I spent more time trying to get my laptop to work than doing homework. Just as the author of the letter, I too type my thoughts on an Apple PowerBook. Where is my Dell now? In my closet collecting dust because they kept sending me defective parts. I even took pictures of one of the four replacements that was damaged at their repair center. On top of that, I took pictures of a hard drive that was sent where pins were bent to the point where the hard drive couldn’t sit properly or function at full capacity. I spent $2000 on a Dell Latitude D505 with a three year waranty. I have to say it was by far the worst investment ever made. In conclusion, the lesson I learned is to investigate the company before purchasing a product of such a high price. Thus, the Apple PowerBook was the replacement. Also, I wrote letters to Michael Dell and REC representatives who refused to cooperate or give a refund because of actions taken on their behalf. In fact, the only reason I don’t sell the Latitude is because I would feel too guilty placing the burden of the Latitude D510 on anyone else’s shoulders.

Jeff,
You obviously are a dick. As for the problem with your sons laptop, that is a common problem with all manufacturers, laptops are not specifically meant for gaming, but thats besides the point. Quite plainly I can see that from the very start you wanted to be an asshole to dell…and they decided to ignore you. Dont go thinking that your pathetic ass blog is going to hurt dell. Go ahead and be like a little bitch and go get an apple…have fun with no programs!

From Miss: Linda Kona.
Abidjan Cote D’ I voire.
Email: ( lindakona014@yahoo.co.nz)

Dear One,
For my safety and security of my future I am making this proposal to you for our mutual benefit. This however is not mandatory nor will I in any manner compel you to honour it against your will. I am Miss: Linda Kona , 22 years old and the only daughter of my late parents Mr.and Mrs. Kona . My father was a highly reputable busnness magnet-(a cocoa merchant)who operated in the capital of Ivory coast during his days. It is sad to say that he passed away mysteriously during one of his business trips abroad on the 12th.july. 2004. Though his sudden death was linked or rather suspected to have been masterminded by an uncle who travelled with him at that time. But God knows the truth! My mother died when I was just 4 years old, and since then my father took me so special. Before his death on july 12th, 2004 he called the secretary who accompanied him to the hospital and told him that he has the sum of Three million, Five hundred thousand United State Dollars.(USD$3.500,000) deposited in a bank here in Abidjan which he use my name as next of kin .

He further told him that he deposited the money with my name as the next of kin, and finally told him to tell me where to find the documents of the deposit which he said was in possession of his lawyer in sealed documents held by him and asked me to collect it from him and all the necessary documents to this fund. I am just 22 years old and a first year university undergraduate and really don’t know what to do.

Now I want a trust worthy person who can help me to transfer this money and provide an account overseas where I can transfer this funds.This is because I have suffered a lot of set backs as a result of incessant political crisis here in Ivory coast. The death of my father actually brought sorrow to my life.I am in a sincere desire of your humble assistance in this regards. Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded.

Now permit me to ask these few questions:-

1. Can you honestly take me as your own and help me.

2. Can I completely trust you?

3. What percentage of the total amount in question will be good for you after the money is in your account?

Please, Consider this and get back to me as soon as possible so that i can forward the documents to you after we have agreed on the conditions for your assistance. My life is not safe here and i need to be out of here as soon as possible because now that my father is dead and with me only as a female child, my uncles will be seeking to kill me so that they can have all my fathers properties. i really don’t want to struggle anything with them in terms of properties but my presence will still be disturbing them. thank God they are not aware of this fund in the bank hence, I want to leave here as soon as you help me to lodge it into a safe account in your stable country and then send me some amount to enable me prepare to meet you. Without your help, i will find it difficult to travel and transfer it myself alone with my little or no experience.

I am waiting for your urgent reply with your contact phone number so that i can give you the contact of the bank were my late father deposited this money
for you to contact them as if you are my late father’s partner.

Thank you so much.

My sincere regards

Miss Linda Kona

I also have a major probelm with Dell and can’t find Dell’s email address or Fax #. Can you help please?
Many thanks,

sally

I have bought several Dell computers over the last 12 years. The first ones were excellent machines; HOWEVER, the last four that I have purchased have been increasingly terrible. I purchased one for my church in January, 2005 and purchased the onsite warranty. In the seven months since purchase, the hard drive has crashed and been replaced, there continues to be problems with the operating system when you try to log on and now tell is trying to say that it is software problems not hardware – when they just replaced the hard drive three weeks ago and reinstalled everything themselves. I have tried to speak with customer support for over four hours this morning and keep getting pushed from one place to another but I always end up in INDIA. I WILL NEVER EVER purchase another Dell computer.

My complaint is about a supplier that Dell employes. My son is a college music student and when we purchased his lap top from Dell it was with a set of speakers vital to his education. These speakers were promised on 8/22/05 and of course we have yet to see them.

Dell now tells us they have been discontinued because Dell no longer uses the supplier. If I want comperable speakers I will have to now on 9/27/05 reorder from Dell. What poor customer service, complete lack of communication, not to mention my biggest complaint the Dell’s Customer Service Department:
1. They are rude and talk down to customers with their scripted answers.
2. They are nameless, try to get the name and number of a person in charge it’s impossible.
3. They disconnect you, lie to you, really do not care, and are for the most part clueless.
4. They bounce you from nebulous dept. to dept. with the same result THEY MADE THE MISTAKE BUT THE ONUS GOES BACK TO THE CUSTOMER.
5. When you try to contact a corporate person via email – forget it – they must know how bad there customer service really is.

Therefore, before going through “Dell Hell” get in you car and purchase your computer from a person with a face and name and a proactive leader to who they report to. I know that what I will do and for Dell – you are a perfect example of most American Customer Service – uncaring, uneducated, and if we are lucky soon out of business.

So many comments regarding poor customer service, let me shed some light on why:

1. Dell treats their vendors and suppliers very bad
a. Payment terms: EOAP50- End of accumulation period, 50. This basically means that the suppliers don’t get paid for 50-75 days. This attracts bottom feeders to the supply chain….the list is long of companies that Dell has put in to BK because of their vendor management processes. They also require price reductions each year, further requiring the supplier to cut costs that impact overall quality performance.
2. Hitting the wall- Dell is hitting the wall in the US market and has no choice but to drive prices lower (reduce costs), as they have done for the past 12 years. The problem is they cannot execute on a global basis. Each region has it’s own business owners and processes. Dell is not growing market share fast enough to offset longterm US revenue declines. What this means is they have created the need in the PC industry to outsource customer service, tech support functions, and even some sales functions to India and areas of APAC. If Dell pulled those functions back, they would be in the RED on every PC they sold…..ala IBM, which sold the unit to Lenovo who IS a global player in the largest growth market in the world: CHINA. Dell cannot compete in China due to the inability to leverage US infrastructure; come on English is spoken pretty much throughout the world now, take some culture classes and increase leverge like everyone else in the business. Use this leverage to focus on the core problems of product quality and customer service training/monitoring.
3. BPI- Business Process Improvement- What a joke. This is nothing more than a bunch of people working on spreadsheets touting huge savings, thereby appeasing executives. This is the BUDGET Six Sigma, developed internally. You have to make investments for continued quality.
4. Engineering- NONE!!!!!!!! Dell doesn’t engineer anything, make no mistake, they are a direct reseller!!!!! Which means if your don’t own the engineering, poor product quality is the result.

From an APPLE customer, former Dell customer, I would not recomend buying from Dell, and as a shareholder, SHORT their stock longterm. They are too far down the path of globization, or lack there of, to fix this train wreck.

I am 3 weeks into my Dell problems, with no resolution in sight. My computer was supposed to have a DVD burner, 512 MB Ram and 80 Gig hard drive…the one I received has a DVD Rom, 256 MB Ram and 40 Gig hard drive. Sounds like I got half the computer I asked for. So far 3 techs have been out to replace various items, only to make matters worse by crashing the computer. Now all I get is a blue screen. I have asked for a new computer but haven’t heard anything in over 24 hours. Imagine that!!

Here is a funny story. So I had a probelem with my notebook motherboard an called supprt. They shipped me a box. When putting the unit into the box, I dropped my notebook and broke the LCD screen (big crack across the entire screen). I figure, hey, they are going to repair it anyway, so I figure once they see the screen is broke, they will put the repair on hold and call me; I actually called tech supprt and they said they would make a note and notify the repair center. Seven days after sending my notebook in for repair, I get the unit back in working fashion; even with a working LCD. They didn’t even charge me for the screen. I called back to customer service (30 min hold) and told them there had been a mistake made, and they said, huh, “Looks like you got a good deal.” When I asked them if they could take a credit card for the repair service, the rep said they had no outstanding bills on my account.

Not paying for repairs like this will keep me coming back for more. Now this is customer service!!! Not so sure this is best for shareholders, but hey……..

THIS IS THE HONEST TRUTH. TIME IS ALL AN ILLUSION. THE CORPORATE HADS AND PEOPLE RUNNING THIS COUNTRY MUST HEAR THIS. SPREAD THIS MESSAGE. IMMORTALITY AND ABSTINENCE WOULD SOLVE ALL WORLD ISSUES. PEOPLE MUST PRACTISE THE HUMILITY AND HONESTY OF SAINTS AND THEN THERE WOULD BE NO WORLD PROBLEMS.
HERE IS EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY COMING!!! IF THIS IS TRUE, THEN TIME IS SIMPLY A TOTAL ILLUSION!!!

This is not a “Match Game” joke. The above is a serious FACT, an absolute!!

A few weeks before my service agreement expired I had problems with my Dell system. The nice folks in India suggested several ways to fix the problem but none worked. They did manage to drag out my case until the service agreement expired & then they refused to help me even though the problem was reported prior the to expiration date. At first they said the would honor the agreement but then backed off and left me with a dead Dell that I had to take to the local repair shop.

I have always had Dell PCs & I even own their stock but all that is changing.

Jeff, thanks for giving me a place to post this and to read what other folks have to say about this once great company.

Bought a new computer for my 81yr. old grandmother-got it all set up and then proceeded to work on it for THREE DAYS STRAIGHT it never would connect to the internet-DELL HELL-is right. Terrible experience with customer service-they even hung up on us! Customer Care would tell us to call Tech Support then Tech Support would tell us to call Customer Care and that happened THREE times…it was a nightmare. We got them to LET us send it back for a full refund-but we had to pay a restocking fee and the shipping and insurance fees…for a maching that never once connected to the internet. This company is for the birds.

Thank you for creating this Dell Hell ranting forum. I have been waiting for this day for several months. Finally my horror story will get out and can prevent others from falling into the same trap. The text below is the exact letter I sent to FIVE different ‘senior’ Dell Customer service agents. I also sent this letter to their head office and emailed it to every high ranking Dell employee who’s email address I could find.

Guess what response I got?

NOTHING! Not even a simple reply.

Here it is…

To whomever might be concerned in continuing to help a dissatisfied customer,

So you understand where I’m coming from, here’s a little background:

Practically every component that could be faulty has been and practically everything that could break has broken.
- the entire LCD screen had a large cluster of pixels burn out
- the motherboard needed replaced TWICE
- the CDRW drive broke twice and the mechanism that clamps it in also broke in an isolated incident
- even the structure of the note book has fallen apart. i had to get a panel replaced because it had dislodged and was prohibiting me from powering the system on. One of the plastic pieces on the side of the monitor has come very loose and will probably soon break or lead to damage to the monitor.
- the ethernet jack only works if I hold the cable into the computer and angle it a specific way
- the battery died within the first year (I know this is expected..but is frustrating nonetheless)
- the windows ME operating system was HORRIBLE and I was basically forced to spend a significant amount of time and money completely replacing it with XP and reloading all my work and programs. I also had to upgrade my RAM to run this new operating system which was an unexpectingly costly affair.
- the floppy drive has never worked and I am too annoyed with constantly having these things break that I haven’t bothered to call you to come and look at it.
- the mouse has also been broken for quite some time but I am now, out of desperation and frustration, needing to get it fixed
- and, of course, just a few weeks ago the hard drive crashed…a huge loss and a GIGANTIC hassle….espcially seeing I am doing business in Asia and all my programs and backup are in Canada.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING TO GO WRONG????
WHY WOULD I EVER BUY A DELL NOTE BOOK AGAIN???
WHAT’S STOPPING ME FROM TELLING ALL MY FRIENDS, CO-WORKERS AND FAMILY HOW HORRIBLE DELL PRODUCTS ARE!??!?!

I turn to you, the customer service experts, for these answers. Given all the issues I have faced and valuable time I have lost, my impression of Dell is overwhelmingly negative and I am extremely dissatisfied by your product.

I hope that you can see this from my perspective and understand the incredible frustration these issues have caused me. As a person in business I understand the power of word of mouth and how one negative comment has at least 10 times the effect as positive one. I am curious to see how good Dell’s customer service actually is and whether or not satisfied customers are an important part of the Dell mission. If it is, I imagine that there will be a proposed solution to do away with my current ‘note book from hell’, proving confidence in your product to want me to test out a different system….one that actually works!

Sincerely,

Andrew H

Can you believe it!?!? No response. None whatsoever! If that isn’t admitting that your products suck, I don’t know what is.

Here is my letter to Dell, can you please tell me where to send it so that it will actually be read?

Thanks,
Eric
erozens@sbcglobal.net

__________________________________

October 11, 2005

To whom it may concern:

The purpose of this letter is to convey my complete dissatisfaction with my Dell purchase. I purchased a brand new Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop in April of 2004 through your website. By March of 2005 I started having problems with it. For no reason at all, my laptop would power off and need to be restarted. As the problem became more persistent, I reported it to Dell and had to send it back for repair. The main board, bottom case and video cable were replaced and it was returned to me at no cost (under warranty). I was disappointed when I got it back as all of the labels on the bottom of the case were messed up and it didn’t appear that much care had been taken to return it to me in the condition in which it was sent. Regardless, I was pleased with the turn around time of the repair and figured I wouldn’t have to worry about my laptop anymore.

I have taken exceptional care of this laptop despite how it has performed; it has never been dropped or abused. In August of this year (2005), I started experiencing the exact same problems and it began powering off again. I called Dell and explained what was going on. Since I only purchased a 1-year warranty (big mistake), I was informed that I would need to replace the motherboard myself at an astronomical cost (nearly what I paid for the laptop). I stressed that this was a recurring problem but that didn’t seem to make a difference.

I understand that I no longer have coverage under the warranty but I’m terribly bothered by what I have learned about this particular laptop and Dell products in general, specifically my power issue. From reading in Dell’s forums and various technical websites and blogs, it appears that hundreds (if not thousands) of Dell customers have complained about repetitive issues with Dell products only to fall on deaf ears. Why doesn’t Dell acknowledge this as a design or engineering flaw and make things right with me (the consumer)? Even though I knew I couldn’t afford to purchase a high-end laptop when I started shopping for one, I was very concerned about quality and reliability. I had always heard good things about Dell so I decided to buy one. I would certainly have expected that a Dell laptop would last longer than 16 months! The part I find most frustrating is that Dell has not offered me any assistance or amicable solution. Your customer service agent just kept apologizing as though that would slowly make me understand that I was out of luck and to just deal with it. He actually suggested I try to find a motherboard on Ebay, I just had to laugh at that.

I consider myself very brand loyal. If I find something I like, I stick with it and am very resistant to change. I will definitely avoid purchasing anything manufactured by Dell in the future. I will also be sure to share my experience with as many people as possible. I’m not a marketing guy but I did hear somewhere that a happy customer may only share his experience with 1 or 2 people whereas an unhappy customer will tell around 12 people. I think I’m somewhere past 12 by now…

Sincerely,
Eric Rozens

This is my problem it explains it in our letter we wrote them. DELL SUCKS!

My letter to Dell

Dear Dell:
I need your help with a situation I’m finding increasingly frustrating.
Approximately on April 7, I purchased your two top-of-the-line laptops-Inspiron 6000 and an Inspiron 9300. This model’s features clearly make it one of the best machines on the market. After about 10 business day they shipped the computers and this is when all the pandemonium occurred. Your company shipped two of the Inspiron 6000’s. Which we only wanted one 6000 and one 9300. It clearly stated in our order # that we ordered a 6000 and a 9300. The 6000 had a different operating system, incompatible with everything in my office. After numerous attempt’s of calling and holding on the phone I was able to talk with a representative but we some how got disconnected (They do it on purpose b/C they don’t want to deal with any problems). After calling back and another hour of convincing on our part. Finally, your company acknowledge that we were indeed correct about your mistake. You agreed that they put all the sticker information: Product ID, Service Tag number etc….any way the wrong information on a 6000 when it should have been an Inspiron 9300 17 in. Then we got disconnected again. Then after calling back I spoke with a VERY RUDE lady by the name of Natasha “She stated, we needed to pay for the shipping and they would credit back our account of the charges involved.” I told them that it was their fault and they needed to have it picked up by Fed Ex …..(Not us)! She stated it was not in the policy that they pay for shipping returns. I then asked to talk with her supervisor and she stated she was too busy. Then she put me on hold for 20 minutes and then told me well Ok that they were going to send an order to have it picked up. As of May 17, 2005 still we have not had any one pick up the incorrect computer.
The following day after I spoke to your order department, who assured me that the correct 9300 Laptop would be delivered by the next 3 business days. The computer did not arrive, until 7-10 days later. In the time of waiting for it to be shipped we had placed many calls wanting to know when we would get the correct computer. All they could say is “Well it is still in the manufacturing stage”. When we asked about the shipping information for the incorrect Laptop that still had not been picked up they told us that it would be sent out for pick up the next day. Which they never did. Then finally, when the 9300 arrived we used it and were dissatisfied because it kept crashing and freezing up. In the process of all that we had to restore the computer to a previous date consequently loosing our data for work related information.
We had to waste approximately 5-6hrs of just trying to convince you of your mistake. Calls for technical support have kept me holding 20 to 30 minutes each time and we have been disconnected on several occasions! Plus time in writing this letter!!!!!!!!

The technicians that I finally reached offered no help and could not understand English very well. Also offered incorrect advice without fully understanding my difficulties.
Their quick answers—and unwillingness to remain on the line while I try their advice—invariably do not solve my problem.
I’m faced with starting all over with another long wait on receiving information to send back our computers, another technician, and a machine that I still cannot use. I think you will understand why I am upset at the manner in which this order was handled. Your excuses and apologies to us are of no comfort. This incident is a horrible way to treat customers. In fact we have ordered many computers from Dell in the past. Your products are some what more expensive but we have been pleased with the service from your company before until now. We have no other option to be forced to buy from another vendor because of this whole incident escalading. I will expect a full refund from your company and information needs to be placed to pick these computer up and if not we will be contacting our attorney.
I can clear say that we will never order from you again especially online.
Obviously, you know what must be done. We are frankly at the end of our patience with Dell. What could have been a relatively simple problem has, through your company’s unresponsiveness, grown into something that is costing me a substantial amount in lost work time
Sincerely,
Nicole Brown

Currently 10/12/2005 We just ended up keeping a Inspiron 6000 but it took forever to get the correct credit from the 9300. They just credited us for the 6000. So we contacted our bank and wrote them a letter explaining our situation and the bank gave us the correct credit amount after 5-6 months. So here is the last update. So my Inspiron 6000 LCD screen cracked. I called dell and asked them if it was under the warranty. (Not to my surprise it was not). Dell stated that we could not get any information because we had a red flag on our account. They said the computers we sent back were lost and they never received them. After hours on the phone AGAIN I explained that they were the one’s who sent to have them picked up and it was not our problem if whoever they had pick them up lost them. It would be different if we sent them our self. Finally we were able to get the red flag removed. Then I found out that the LCD screen is not covered so it’s going to be like $500 to get it replaced. I am just going to see about getting the part shipped and having someone else install it. If I shipped my computer back I would be fearful that they would accidentally loose it. DELL SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m so sorry I did not find this blog before. Last month I ordered with Dell and if I would have known I would enter a Kafka book, I would have taken my business elsewhere. My order was cancelled because they don’t seem to match payments with orders very accurate. After giving the payment details they told me they would contact me as soon as the payment was found. One week later I called them again and asked them about the status of my order. The payment was found, but due to the cancellation the order had to be rebooked by the rebooking department. Ok a rebooking department…, that sounds nasty, doesn’t seem to happen only once or twice. Not at all, due to the workload this department is way behind in his workload. Ouch. A rebookingdepartment which is behind in his workload. I’ve asked for a confirmation of the receiving of the payment which she would send. Still waiting and I think this is the start of a long nightmare and reading all of the above I’m still a newbie to that nightmare. Thanks for all the stories, I’m so sad-glad to be part of this new community.

Dells customer service is horrible. I’d like not to think the customer service is not intentionally difficult to access, but whenever I call the sales line, I think otherwise. Just to check on an item for exchange, took hours and hours without help.

Oh how I wished I had found this site before sending myself to Dell Hell in June of 2005. I have had software problems since the day I recieved my machine. Well since one week after recieving it. That is when the “Dell recommended” Aloha Bob package showed up and blew up the Dell Inspiron6000. Well I did the vaunted “f11″ And now my Office Outlook is screwed up and it will not open any power point presentation that is not created on this machine. I have called Dell and they have directed me to Microsoft because it is a software error…. but as you all probably know… according to Microsoft… the software that comes on a Dell computer is not a Microsoft Product because it has OEM in the serial number. Hmm then why does it not say… Dell Office 2003? Sorry I digress. So back to Dell a number of times to people who you can not understand on the phone who only want $50 to fix your problem in the next three days but can not promise to fix your problem. They claim they can not promise to fix it because of federal law? I hope my Chevrolet dealer does not find out about that law. So now I am perusing the Yellow Book for a local repair shop with somebody who is old enough to shave. Dell? Never again. Thanks Mikey. My dream to be seated between Billy Gates and Mikey Dell on a cross county airline flight. I can dream can’t I?

I tried to extend the warranty for my Dell C610, and as you can think, I got pissed by the customer survices.

“You have to call another line….OK?” (The same line, just different option, which I never heard about the key word “warranty” when I listened to the options)
“They are off now, you have to call by….OK?” (It’s just 3:00 P.M. in LA)
“They will tell you which number to call if you call in their office hours….OK?” (When I said that I was refered by other Dell warranty extension service people)

OF COURSE, NONE OF THE ANSWERS SHOULD BE OK!!!
THESE QUESTIONS EVEN SHOULD NOT BE ASKED BY CUSTOMER SERVICES!!!

Why should I call another line? I spend more than 20 mninutes just been transfered here and there…. A computer company like Dell can’t build a database that utilize all the inforrmations of their products and help the customers by the first customer services when we called? If you can’t, how can I trust a computer company which can’t build a database by their own?

I have to indicate that, last time I called to ask for replace the screen for my laptop (because of a growing dark spot), it took me more than 1 and half hour talk to the customer services, and I had to repeat more than three times to different service people.

Dell….

Dear Sir/Ma,
LETTER OF BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

We are one of the Major Marketers of all brands of GSM mobile phones like Nokia/Samsung/LG/Sony Ericsson/Motorola/Alcatel/panasonic, all Brands and Models of Nextel Phones. We are a registered firm and one of the leading brokers in the G.S.M/MOBILE PHONE Market in Nigeria. We do have Brand New phones in stock. Our brand new Phones are in their Original box with all accesories, unlockes and are ready to be used anywere in the world. All phones carries one year International warranty. All accessories intact. Our prices are very Competitive. We look forward to a good trading time with you. Thanks! Mike Davidson, General Secretary omega plaza phones limited e-mail us at
omegaplazaphones@yahoo.com
Thank’s and God bless.
Mike Davidson(Sales Rep)
Nokia 1100– US$55

I purchased a Dell Inspiron 9300 top of the line laptop for $Aus 3000.
I have had two attempts with the helpdesk trained (fob you off monkeys) reading from a resolution sheet and not yet solving the problem which Dell was responsible for in the first place.
I am an Aussie high school teacher who has outlayed my hard earned cash and now seeking a legally entitled tax break on my outlay.

Dell has been incapable of suppling a purchase invoice with my correct name and details on it. They shipped to my school with the school’s name on the invoice. This is despite me supplying the correct name and shipping address. I need the correct detailed invoice to reclaim my tax rebate.
In the first instance I contacted the original salesman who gave me an Australian contact. Before I could contact him, my home machine with the contact details on it crashed.

Second instance was to contact the Dell customer relations person who was quick in returning my enquiry. I sent him details in return and his response was to quote ” highlight my concerns with the respective team who will get your request done in the shortest time possible.”
That was ten days ago readers 13th October.
The Dell computers may be high quality but the after sales service ,which I believe I have paid for, is not. I wonder how many boards I can tell my story on before dell fixes their problem?
Are you reading this MR Dell
Customer 2540284

we are mobilephone dealer,we sell various brands of phones at a very cheap price,our phones are of international standards and brand new and also carries a one year waranty.here are some of the phones we have in stock: NEXTEL I930 FOR JUST $140, NEXTEL I860 FOR JUST $135, NOKIA 9500 FOR JUST $190, SAMSUNG D 500 FOR JUST $200, NOKIA 8800 FOR JUST $200, SIDEKICK 2 FOR JUST $150, MPX300 FOR JUST $185, P910 FOR JUST $150, P800 FOR JUST $140, MOTOROLA RAZOR V3 AT JUST……… $150USD MTOROLA MPX 300 AT JUST ……..$120USD MOTOROLA MPX 200 ………$125USD NEXTEL I860 AT JUST ………$100 NEXTEL I930 AT JUST …………$125 NOKIA 8850 SPECIAL EDITION– US$140 NOKIA 8850 GOLD EDITION– US$135 Sony Ericsson K500i, $100 Sony Ericsson S700i $140 Sony Ericsson: Z1010 $100 nokia 6630 at just $130 samsung E700 AT JUST $140 SAMSUNG E715 AT JUST $140 SAMSUNG E 800 AT JUST $150 NOKIA 9300 AT JUST $180 NOKIA 7280 AT JUST $130, NOKIA 7610, AT JUST $120 AND MANY MORE CHEAP PHONES IN STOCK interested buyer should contact us with the following email for more informations:pedro_umeh4@yahoo.com

i bough a inspiron laptop from Dell here in the UK on the 25th October 2005. On delivery, the laptop did not work, a engineer was booked to come on the following friday, i took the day of work, i then get a phone call to say engineer can’t make it, so thats one day lost! The appointment is then set for the 31st Oct 2005 between 9-5pm, after 5 phone calls to Dell, he arrives at 7.15 pm! spent over 1 hour and could not fix it. Why? because he was given a faulty motherboard! how bad is that! as a result i have lost two days of work. I spent a total of over 4 hours on the phone and sent over 10 emails to Dell’s call centr in India to the sales rep i bought the system of, all i got was 5 ” out of office” automated replies. I then phone John Allen, Teresa, Mr Rana (head of Bangalore office) and lots of other people. Not one of them said sorry, we will compensate you. Up to day, the laptop is at home still not working. Mr Michael Dell, if you are readign this, take note, your company is going downhill. Your customer care dept is terrible. As a customer you get put on hold, then onto Technical help then back onto customer care and you end up talking to someone in Bangalore!

I would stay well clear of dell, i would advise anyone thinking of buying dell, dont!!!!!!!!!, does not matter how cheap!!! go to a shop and buy a apple or a sony! Even if someone paid me, i would never in my life touch another dell machine. Id anyone at Dell is reading this please email me at hanifloonat@hotmail.com and lets get this sorted. It is impossible to get a contact point for Michale Dell, so i found this website and found i am not alone, there are thousands like me, suffering, stressed at “dell diseace”

Hello everybody in this forum, i work in Dell as tech. support rep. and something that i always tell our customers is this: if you want to buy a Dell, don’t buy inspirons or dimension they are the bottom line of our products, all the problems that we can find in those product we fix them so they are not going to happen in our top models(latitude, optiplex, precision workstation, xps(non dimension), poweredge server), so you are complaining becuase your system are not working…? obviusly, that would happen, you are using toyotas and you think you have a ferrari, so next time save more money and try to go for something good, something that you can really trust on, we test all brands of hard drives, memories, motherboard in all of our bottom models and we take the good ones and we use them in our top system, that’s the point, you want the true…?, here is the true…….

It’s really the small things. I tried to get a cool laptop cover from Dell. You would think that they would be able to send the right one for the model I gave them….THREE wrong laptop covers later and I am still going round and round with customer service. Now they will not credit my account..because the return date has expired! Never mind that that I notified within the correct time and they chose to send me another wrong one!

and one last thing, look the 75% of the call in tech support it’s something that is related to windows, it doesn’t matter what version, the only good advice that can someone with cumputer knoledge can give to Mr. Dell and Mr. Rolin is change the O.S. to mac or linux or something else becuase windows it’s piece a crap, don’t never ever relia on windows or any product coming from microsoft, the 10% of the call they are something relate it ISP (internet service provider) that’s is the reason why when you call dell you have to pay if you need help with either software or ISP’s becuase we build hardware “NO” softwares even if they say dell it’s just for comercial purpose, and the other 10% of the call it’s something like how to, for example how to burn cd’s, how to make a wireless network, how to reinstall windows, and the last 5% believe it or not is something relate to hardware, like clicking noise in the hard drive, overheating, the system runs very loud and so. i guess all of you may think i’m in love with Delll but gues what…?, no i don’t like dells system, they look ugly for me, but i need to tell you the true, in the market rigth now for me rather build my own system beside talking or figthing or crying becuase no one wants to take care of it, if make you own computer (pieces by pieces) you know what could go bad and how to fix it by you own and you don’t need to relia on someone else….

stop being stupid, i’m not north american(just to inform you guys remember americas it’s from Alsaka to Argentina¹) and i’m not indian in burn in latin america i work for dell latin america and we in latin america we lear something about all the yankees company they never do what they promise, so you can’t spect the heaven from any USA company becuase they will make you see “the ring” and i’m telling you the true, in latin america all replacement parts goes new but if you have your system in USA they go refurbished(LOL) ask someone and he will tell you that i’m not wrong, hahahahahahahahahahahaahahah……. and they will never ever send you a new part, so come on……?

¹Amerigo Vespucci:
Naming the New World
I returned to Portugal in June 1502. Although my fleet had not explored the islands off the coast of Asia, we had discovered a continent between Europe and Asia previously unknown to Europeans. My name was given to North America and South America because I was the first to recognize that it wasn’t a part of Asia. I claimed to have explored these continents in 1497, and it led the mapmaker, Martin Waldseemuller, to consider me, instead of Columbus, as the man who discovered North and South America. He suggested naming these continents after me to honor my expeditions.

Antithesis.-Antithesis is the narrow gate through which error is fondest of sneaking to the truth. ......

The one thing needful.- One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.
......

Forgetting experiences.- Whoever thinks much and to good purpose easily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts which these experiences have called forth. ......

Books which teach how to dance.- There are authors who, by representing the impossible as possible, and by talking of morality and cleverness as if both were merely moods and humours assumed at will, produce a feeling of exuberant freedom, as if man stood on tiptoe and were compelled to dance from sheer, inward delight. ......

How courageous people are won over.-Courageous people are persuaded to a course of action by representing it as more dangerous than it really is.
......

Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape. ......

What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? Seek zeros! ......

The lawyers defending a criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of his deed to his advantage.
......

Poets treat their experiences shamelessly: they exploit them.
......

I too purchased the “Dell Dream” and ended up the the Dell Financial Hell. Purchased my Dell online and was offered the great deal of “no payments for 6 months”. I opted to pay for my Dell through online banking and well before the 6 mth deadline. Following the instructions I received from Dell Canada Corporation I paid my bill and carried on using my Dell. Well I guess Dell sold my invoice to Dell Finance who started deducting monthly from my bank account. It has taken me 4 months to get them to even acknowledge they have taken my money and now taken monthly payments in error. Get this! Dell Canada receive payments and do not transfer over to Dell Finance they just hold on to the money – hoping for what? My Bank had to fax proof over to Dell Canada and then I am told it will take 4 weeks before they can cut me a cheque. Reason? Well once they have made a mistake and it has been for more than 2 months they need to investigate. Meanwhile they owe me 100′s of dollars for doing nothing more than paying my bill through the account they had directed me to pay. Apparently, Dell finance does not talk to Dell Canada and you can never speak with a supervisor!

Dream on Dell if I ever buy another computer from you. I am now looking at buying a new computer for my home, one for my daughter off to do her MBA and one for my other daughter attending University. Thanks for all your help Dell !!!!! NOT.

And to say it once more. Public opinions- private lazinessess. ......

Eddy,

you are too loyal to work for Dell. My point is this. You buy a dell, you go to customer services, they take your details 10 times over and still not nothing. Is not true to say, the others are the same, they are not! i have just bought a sony from a sony shop, sony customer services phoned me next day to see how things were, could they do anythign else? how cool is that? thats customer service for you. Dell customer services never get back to you , its does not matter if they are in India or the UK, all they do is give you a service tag, take details and string you along…… I have spoken to people in customer services , i have already named and shamed these guys in previous postings, they promise you lots, deliver nothing. Eddy , you are to kind to dell. I too have my own business, if i treated my customers in the same way, i would be filing for bankcrupcy now! its all about customer satisfaction at the end of the day, its the small customer that pays your wages, its not Mr Dell or your human resources ctr. If you cannot keep your customers happy, you lose them , its simple economics, you do not need a degree to figure that out.

Whom do you call bad?-Those who always want to put to shame.
......

What do you consider most humane?-To spare someone shame.
......

Another sad story of long waits for customer service holding on line. Bought a Dell 4600c for my 3rd grade son.
Side drive never worked properly. Basic games would freeze up. Apparently this design had more than normal share of problems. After three weeks of frustration with customer service. I bought an Imac G5 for my son.. Enough said

HI Can you help me in getting HTML code of any webapge into an array

I am using
$html = file_get_contents (‘www.url.com/index.html’);
$my_array = explode(” “, $html);
$numElements = count($my_array);
for($counter=0; $counter

Can any one help me out. Thanks in Advance ;)

Imran

End and goal.-Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn’t reached its goal. A parable. ......

Prohibitions without reasons. A prohibition, the reason for which we do not understand or admit, is almost a command not only for the stubborn but also for those who thirst for knowledge: One risks an experiment to find out why the prohibition was pronounced. Moral prohibitions, like those of the Decalogue, are suitable only for an age of subjugated reason: Now, such a prohibition as “Thou shalt not kill’ or “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Presented without reasons, would have a harmful rather than a useful effect. ......

Against an enemy. How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy! ......

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OUR COMPANY IS A WELL EXTERBLISHED COMPANY WE SELL
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WE SELL ALL OUR GOODS WITH FULL WANRRATY.AND WE SHIPP TO
ANY COUNTRY OF YOUR CHIOCE,THROUGH FEDEX.AND WE TAKE ALL
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CHEQUE,MONEY GRAME,WESTAN UNION,AND MANY OTHER PAYMENT
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OUR COMPANY SO THAT THE GOODS YOU BUY FROM US WILL
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OUR E-mail,
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NOKIA 2100– US$75
NOKIA 3210– US$30
NOKIA 3310– US$35
NOKIA 3330– US$60
NOKIA 3410– US$49
NOKIA 3510– US$59
NOKIA 3510i– US$69
NOKIA 3530– US$100
NOKIA 3200–US$75
NOKIA 3595–US$105
NOKIA 3620–US$145
NOKIA 3315–US430
NOKIA 5110I–US$60
NOKIA 5588–US$150
NOKIA 8250–US$70
NOKIA 8210–US$65
NOKIA 9110–US$100
NOKIA 6150–US$80
NOKIA 6600–US$220
NOKIA 3650– US$160
NOKIA 5100– US$135
NOKIA 5210– US$119
NOKIA 5510– US$129
NOKIA 6090– US$180
NOKIA 6100– US$100
NOKIA 6210– US$90
NOKIA 6250– US$129
NOKIA 6510– US$109
NOKIA 6310– US$105
NOKIA 6310i– US$105NO
NOKIA 7110– US$109
NOKIA 7210 Turquoise– US$109
NOKIA 7250– US$175
NOKIA 7650– US$140
NOKIA 8310– US$85
NOKIA 8910 TITANIUM– US$165
NOKIA 8850 SPECIAL EDITION– US$165
NOKIA 8850 GOLD EDITION– US$150
NOKIA 8910 Black– US$165
NOKIA 9210 Communicator– US$210
NOKIA 6170–US$268
NOKIA 6260–US$283
NOKIA 9210i Communicator– US$210
NOKIA 8910i– US$210
NOKIA N90..120USD
NOKIA N91…130IUSD
NOKIA 6600 …40USD
NOKIA 8800….50USD
SONY ERICSSON T200– US$39
SONY ERICSSON T100– US$29
SONY ERICSSON R600– US$49
SONY ERICSSON T20e– US$49
SONY ERICSSON P800–US$225
SONY ERICSSON T20s– US$59
SONY ERICSSON T28s– US$59
SONY ERICSSON T28 World– US$69
SONY ERICSSON T29s– US$79
SONY ERICSSON T600– US$79
SONY ERICSSON P900–US$275
SONY ERICSSON T300– US$79
SONY ERICSSON T68i– US$89
SONY ERICSSON T65– US$89
SONY ERICSSON T20—US$75
SONY ERICSSON T310– US$69
SONY ERICSSON T39m– US$79
SONY ERICSSON T66– US$79
SONY ERICSSON R520m– US$89
SONY ERICSSON A3618–US$60
SONY ERICSSON R380 World– US$89
SONY ERICSSON R380s– US$69
SONY ERICSSON T68m– US$79
SONY ERICSSON T610– US$129
SONY ERICSSON P700– US$200
SONY ERICSSON Z100–US$301:00USD
SONY ERICSSON P910–US$400:00USD
SONY ERICSSON Z500–$204:00USD
SONY CMD-MZ5– US$169
SONY CMD-Z5– US$89
SONY CMD-J5– US$69
SONY CMD-Z7– US$79
SONY CMD-J7– US$79
SONY CMD-J6– US$79
SONY CMD-J70– US$49

MOTOROLA T250–us$29
MOTOROLA p7389–us$25
MOTOROLA T2288–us$45
MOTOROLA Talkabout 191– US$19
MOTOROLA C330– US$49
MOTOROLA V66– US$59
MOTOROLA v66i– US$59
MOTOROLA TALKABOUT192– US$49
MOTOROLA V51– US$69
MOTOROLA V50– US$69
MOTOROLA V70– US$69
MOTOROLA V60– US$69
MOTOROLA V60i– US$69
MOTOROLA T720– US$69
MOTOROLA ACCOMPOLI 008– US$69
MOTOROLA TTIMEPORT 280– US$69
MOTOROLA MPX200–US$199
MOTOROLA I730–US$299
MOTOROLA V300–$99
MOTOROLA M6088–US$65
MOTOROLA STARTAC 328–us$29
MOTOROLA TIMEPORTP7389–US$45
MOTOROLA V60G–$100
MOTOROLA T190/T191–US$25

SAMSUNG SGH-S105– us$80
SAMSUNG SGH-N620– US$49
SAMSUNG SGH-A800– US$59
SAMSUNG SGH-A300– US$69
SAMSUNG SGH-R210– US$69
SAMSUNG SGH-N100– US$69
SAMSUNG SGH-N400– US$79
SAMSUNG SGH-T100– US$59
SAMSUNG SGH-A400– US$59
SAMSUNG SGH-S100– US$59
SAMSUNG SGH-A200– US$59
SAMSUNG SGH-T400– US$69
SAMSUNG SGH-S300– US$69
SAMSUNG SGH-A500– US$139
SAMSUNG SGH-T500 Champagne– US$129
SAMSUNG SGH-V200– US$159
SAMSUNG SGH-T200– US$149
SAMSUNG SGH-R225–US$15
SAMSUNG SGH-E715–US$175
SAMSUNG SGH-V206–US$105
SAMSUNG SGH-A460–US$65
SAMSUNG SGH-V205–US$100
SAMSUNG SGH-R220–US$30
SAMSUNG SGH-N740–US$45
ALCATEL One Touch 501– US$39
ALCATEL One Touch 311– US$35
ALCATEL One Touch 701– US$43
ALCATEL One Touch 511– US$49
ALCATEL OT525– US$39
ALCATEL One Touch 512– US$9
ALCATEL One Touch 715– US$69

panasonic TX310–$115
PANASONIC TG2593B–$159
PANASONIC GD35– US$39
PANASONIC GD52– US$49
PANASONIC GD67– US$49
PANASONIC GD92– US$69
PANASONIC GD90– US$69
PANASONIC GD93– US$69
PANASONIC GD75– US$79
PANASONIC GD55– US$79
PANASONIC GD95– US$79
PANASONIC GU87–US$130
PANASONICT X320–US$110
PANASONIC GD87– US$149
PANASONIC TG2000B–$219
PANASONIC TG4000—$210

SIEMENS A55–US$40
SIEMENS C35–us$10
SIEMENS S57–us$7
SIEMENS CL50–US$95
SIEMENS A50– US$35
SIEMENS C45– US$39
SIEMENS C55– US$49
SIEMENS M35i– US$59
SIEMENS M50– US$49
SIEMENS S45i– US$79
SIEMENS S40– US$89
SIEMENS SL42– US$89
SIEMENS ME45– US$79
SIEMENS SL45– US$69
SIEMENS SL45i– US$69
SIEMENS S55– US$69
SIEMENS S55 Camera– US$39
SIEMENS C150–us$29
SIEMENS A40–us$13
SIEMENS SX56–US$165

PHILIPS Fisio 120– US$19
PHILIPS Fisio 311– US$29
PHILIPS Fisio 620– US$21
PHILIPS Fisio 825– US$29

NOKIA 2100– US$75
NOKIA 3210– US$30
NOKIA 3310– US$35
NOKIA 3330– US$60
NOKIA 3410– US$49
NOKIA 3510– US$59
NOKIA 3510i– US$69
NOKIA 3530– US$100
NOKIA 3200–US$75
NOKIA 3595–US$105
NOKIA 3620–US$145
NOKIA 3315–US430
NOKIA 5110I–US$60
NOKIA 5588–US$150
NOKIA 8250–US$70
NOKIA 8210–US$65
NOKIA 9110–US$100
NOKIA 6150–US$80
NOKIA 6600–US$220
NOKIA 3650– US$160
NOKIA 5100– US$135
NOKIA 5210– US$119
NOKIA 5510– US$129
NOKIA 6090– US$180
NOKIA 6100– US$100
NOKIA 6210– US$90
NOKIA 6250– US$129
NOKIA 6510– US$109
NOKIA 6310– US$105
NOKIA 6310i– US$105NO
NOKIA 7110– US$109
NOKIA 6170 $210 USD
NOKIA 7210 Turquoise– US$109
NOKIA 7250– US$175
NOKIA 7650– US$140
NOKIA 8310– US$85
NOKIA 8910 TITANIUM– US$165
NOKIA 8850 SPECIAL EDITION– US$165
NOKIA 8850 GOLD EDITION– US$150
NOKIA 8910 Black– US$165
NOKIA 9210 Communicator– US$210
NOKIA 6170–US$268
NOKIA 6260–US$283
NOKIA 9210i Communicator– US$210
NOKIA 8910i– US$210
NOKIA N90..120USD
NOKIA N91…130IUSD
NOKIA 6600 …40USD
NOKIA 8800….50USD

Iron necessity.- Iron necessity is a thing which has been found, in the course of history, to be neither iron nor necessary.
......

THREE HOURS ON THE PHONE WITH INDIA!!!!!!!!!! No customer support, nor service. My sales associate was in South America, and the terrible cue card readers in INDIA!. I dont mind the ethnicity, but pretend you care and know what the hell you’re talking about!!!!

I recently bought a Dell computer because I knew that Dell had the premier customer service. Four months later, it stopped working.

After 2 1/2 hrs on the phone troubleshooting (after diagnostics, he asked me to remove the hard drive, the motherboard and the internal modem card), I asked for a supervisor. After establishing the fact that I was an “uncooperative customer,” the supervisor agreed to send out a technician.

The technician came and replaced the motherboard and the hard drive, losing of course all my data, since I had not backed everthing up since I had total faith in Dell for quality systems.

Then I had to re-load the software.

After I re-loaded my McAfee, I was told by my computer that my service tag number was not valid. I called Dell’s wonderful support team again. They told me that the service tag was valid, SO FOR A FEE, I could have software support to correct the problem that they caused on my 4 months old computer!

TOMORROW I PLAN TO TAKE OUT A FULL PAGE AD IN THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE THAT SAYS “DELL SUCKS.”

As I type this. I am in Dell’s hold “cue” in the Live help. I have been there for 3 hours now. The first two CSR’s would not answer any question directly. The ignored my question 8x for a supervisors name. Simply responding with “We suggest you call our customer care number at @%@^% then they disconnect. The Dell reps also give fake names. You will see when they sign on a name such as “Jose” then when they speak they will respond with something like. “Hello my name is Andre how can I help you?” All questions as to which is their real name are ignored as well. If you ask more then a few times they disconnect you. Do yourself a favor and buy a custom built machine from your local PC shop! Just some advice from a NASA tech and IT consultant for 10+ years. The sad thing is I liked Dell’s till I ran into a problem I could not fix. I feel sorry for the typical user. Stay away!
http://www.TechsInCars.com
-Patrick

By the way I am “next in que” for 26 minutes now. The CSRs are going very out of their way to avoid answering questions.

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Hi! My blog is almost done! You are wellcome to see it!

Dell does not care – bottom line. They do not offer any customer support. We are Dell Premier and Dell does not care about our account. They lie to us, the miss delivery dates, they are rude – Dell is Hell. We are getting out.

I recently placed an order with dell, and asked for the representative to send me a reciept via e-mail. After nothing showed up I called Dell back, and found out my name was incorrectly spelled, my address was wrong, and my order was incorrectly filled. Imagine that order being sent out to me. I felt like I was going to my son’s kindergarten class and holding the kid’s hands so they would actually do what they were supposed to do, but it gets better. After spending precious hours on the phone I finally get in touch with the customer service desk and talk to a manager who had no understanding of customer service or any ability to speak english. The typical respons, “I am sorry if this has caused you any inconvenience.” Hmm let me think 6 hours on the phone is absolutley no inconvenince. Having my name, address, and order wrong is exactly what I expect from a company. He made it sound like it was my fault that it had happened. Well I guess he was right. It was my fault for ever thinking _ell was an option for buying a computer.

underage nudist pictures

My mentally-challenged brother telephoned me in a panic this evening. He had attempted to order the $399 Dimension Desktop advertised in the newspaper, for emailing his friends, but the sales rep , one “Criselda Lacasandile” criticized it and pressured him into spending $1402.76!

If you google “Bait and Switch Dell”, you’ll see that this is nothing new. And highly illegal. Dealing with customer-service was a nightmare. After 45 minutes on “hold” I had to ask the woman to repeat herself at least three times per sentence, for the foreign accent was so strong.

I emailed the company, and in the morning, will write anyone and everyone who should know this, including heads of Dell, the Mississippi office of the Attorney General, and anyone else I can think of. My husband and I own Dells, but never will we deal with them again.

It is very obvious when you speak with my brother that he is “slow”. This sales rep saw a goal mine. They’ll probably give her an award. The customer service rep advised my brother to refuse delivery, and UPS would return the computer to Dell. But their website says he’ll still be charged postage and insurance both ways, as well as a “restocking fee”.
I’m going to fight that all the way.

Stupid Dell! We hates them!

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It feels so good to read that I am not the only one in Dell HELL! I’ve been through a number of techs support calls with India. The tech people try to be so helpful. If the problem is not readily apparent, then prepare to be on the phone forever as they shuttle back and forth between supervisors and you. Often times, the connection fails and you have to start all over again. The parameters of their computer knowlege is very limited.
When I tried to speak to someone in customer care sending me the wrong CD drive through email, I was given a number that is no longer in service and referred to another number that offered plenty of options, but none that applied to my situation.
I will never touch a Dell computer again. The hard drive rumbles so loud that I can hear it in another room and now the tower turns itself on and off continuously before it finally loads. I have had this computer (XPS desktop) for one month. So much for bang for your buck. I have been had!

For the past several weeks I have been attempting to get Dell to fix the problem with the broken computer that they sold to my company, a small non-profit organization that provides residential and support services for developmentally disabled individuals. Dell has been loathe to help me in any way and consistently has asked for money to assist me. With tech support on the phone we determined through numerous tests that the memory was in fact bad. I had been repeatedly told by the Dell employees that it must be my fault and was all but accused of being stupid. This computer had never been hooked up to the internet and had no new programs installed on it, yet the Dell customer help line would not believe this. Finally after repeated tests that confirmed over and over again that it was in fact Dell who had shipped a substandard and unusable product to me, the gentleman on the other end of the phone with Dell, told me to get out a screwdriver and remove a panel on the underside of my laptop, and then try to reseat some of the chips to see if I could perform the necessary repairs on my brand new computer myself! I was flabbergasted at the thought of this. I am not a computer tech. I work in an office without the necessary tools to fix my brand new computer, and I of course should not even be asked to! I told the gentleman that I had read nothing in the warranty that said I should be performing computer maintenance on my own computer. He became very angry upon hearing this. He told me that I should be able to do it, that it was not a very difficult piece of computer maintenance. I told him again that I was not a tech, that I did not have the tools, that I worked in an office, and that I had read nothing in the warranty that required me to perform tests on either the hardware or perform maintenance on the hardware myself. He became angrier and told me that he would talk to his manager. After being on hold for quite some time, the gentleman returned and said very abruptly that his manager had told him that I should call back when I get a screwdriver so that he can talk me through the repairs! He then tried to hang up on me! I caught him before he managed to complete the “Thank you for choosing Dell”, and told him that I would like to talk to his manager. He would not let me, and instead put me on hold again. He returned then, some time later, and told me that he would send a box out to me for me to mail the faulty computer back to Dell for Dell to repair. He told me that the box would be there in one to two days. I thanked him.
I waited for over a week, and the Dell box had not arrived yet. I called Dell again on November 30th 2005, and again I spent a long time on hold waiting to speak with someone as to why I had not received what I had been promised by Dell…again. Eventually I got to speak with someone. They told me that the box had been sent but that I would have to call the shipping company to check the tracking number myself to see what was going on with the box. I was given a phone number by one of Dell’s representatives (I will not mention here), that I repeated back to her and she confirmed that this was the number to call to find out about my box. I called the number. I will just preface this next bomb, by stating that by this time I had spent probably ten hours or more on the phone with Dell trying to get them to take responsibility for their end of the agreement, and to actually get me a computer that works. So, the phone number that I was given in order for me to find out why Dell couldn’t get a box to me so that I could ship back the substandard, faulty laptop that Dell tried to pawn off on me, WAS A SEX LINE NUMBER! I was very, very upset by this. How could Dell be so completely incompetent on all levels of their operation?
I called back on the same day to try to resolve the issue. I spoke with two individuals who did not want to address the problems, and finally I spoke with a manager who apologized and told me that the number I was given, was given in error. Well…I already knew it was not the right number…big revelation there! So, he gave me another number and apologized. That’s it. That’s how Dell fixed this problem. Pretty pathetic. Unfortunately Dell’s incompetence did not end there.
I called the number and they told me that the reason that the box had not been sent, was because Dell had never bothered to ship the box. Dell had paid so little attention to fixing their mistakes that they didn’t even take the time to ship me the box they had promised! I went to the webpage of the shipping service, and indeed the box had not been sent. I saved this webpage as evidence of Dell’s ongoing incompetence and complete disregard for their customers…below is a key excerpt.

“No status available. Please contact us.”

So, what am I supposed to do now? Countless hours wasted on Dell. Dell does not care and offers substandard equipment that they will not admit any liability for. Dell will not act in a timely manner to correct their own mistakes. I have no computer. I have wasted many hours needlessly. Nobody I know will ever buy a Dell. Was it worth it for Dell to do this? If you could only imagine the amount of suffering and outrage that I have gone through, just in an attempt to get what I ordered.

Daniel F. McNulty
df_mcnulty@yahoo.com

Speaking of Dell Hell, I have been in it since Nov. 9th with no satisfaction. I ordered a nice new Dell on Nov 9th and it was slated to arrive via UPS on Nov. 16. Only the monitor arrived. No PC. Finally on the 18th UPS told me and Dell that the system was lost and to file a claim and tracer. Since the evening of the 16th (when my local ups already had told me it was lost but to wait til the 17th) I called Dell and got the Indians. I have called them literally 40 times a day since and have had no satisfaction. On the 22nd of Nov I finally was able to find someone in this country that claimed to be from their executive offices that would expedite my refund (by this time I never wanted to deal with Dell again and did not want another computer. They had refused to send me a new one until UPS either paid them back for the lost one or found the one I had ordered.

Anyway the person in this country has been promising me since the 22nd that I would get my refund overnite and today is Dec 3 and no refund!! The monitor went back to them 10 over a week ago (and that took some doing!!! the indians never sent ups to pick it up!!) and ups found the other computer and returned it to Dell 5 days ago. Still no refund!! My only consolation is that on Dec. 22nd my bank card is going to credit me back inspite of Dell. Unfortunately my bank said they had to give them 30 days to credit me back after I put it in the dispute dept. Don’t wait to dispute the charge with your bank if you have charged one. Do it right away because it is a long wait to get any satisfaction. The new date for my refund to go thru is next monday but I am not holding my breath. I have heard this since Nov. 22nd. I will never do business again with Dell. In fact I bought a new HP the other day and it is wonderful. Does anyone have any idea when Dell might refund me for a computer I never received? How many months does it take? I can’t believe QVC is doing business with them. It makes me choke whenever I hear the spiel on there about how wonderful the service is!

I have a dell excuse-for-a-workstation, provided by the employer. The video chipset failed, and produced an annoying horizontal line across the middle of the screen. The Dell drone came out and swapped the motherboard. Upon flame-up… blue screen. The drone cheerfully stated, “Well… that’s where I leave off. We don’t do software support.”

Thankfully for me, I had a working machine online, and after 3 hours of paid company time, was able to locate the necessary video driver that Mr. Dell;s INEPT CLOWN could not provide.

The same exact scenario was repeated on another wonderful Dell boat anchor two years later. But that time, I already had the driver.

Now, as I consider a $2000 HP Pavilion ZD8000 laptop– (and am very concerned about buying an HP)– I find that Dell’s reputation is only marginally better. Moreover, I have no intention of dealing with some cheerful Indian jackass named “Bobby” who will likely be stumbling over himself to provide customer disservice for these cheapskate companies.

actually, i love my dell computers – 3 of them. but not the last one. why isn’t anyone from dell responding to my complaint?

****

no one has even called me, let alone left a message. please call.

Dear NEIL,

Thank you for calling Dell Customer Care.

We are contacting you to provide you with the Case Number for your call:
116715217. If you need additional assistance, please reply to this email with
the best times for us to call you and preferred phone numbers. We will make
our best effort to reach you at these times, or as soon as possible
thereafter.

When replying to this email, please leave the subject line unchanged so we
can route your reply.

Thank you for choosing Dell.

Ernanie
Rep ID 0197308

________________
How are we doing? In an effort to improve our service to you, Dell randomly
surveys our customers. If you receive a survey from Dell by email, we would
like to hear about your experience with us.

i’m sorry i’m difficult to reach by phone, and did not hear from you last
thursday, when i happened to be available all day.

please respond to the present email as an explanation of my complaint:

i own 3 Dell computers, a 333Mhz inspiron, a 500Mhz dimension, and a 2.8Ghz
dimension. i am a small, but long-time consumer of dell products, and very
satisfied.

in september, i ordered a dell dimension for my daughter. based on your
advertising, i selected the celeron chip, which was described as a reliable chip
for everyday computing. this compared to descriptions of more advanced
chips as being good for intense data handling as in gaming or business
applications.

however, i had the opportunity about 2 weeks ago to see my daughters
computer in operation for the first time, and it was completely inadequate and
amazingly slow. your advertising never mentioned speed, and was completely
misleading in terms of what to expect in this regard, since “adequate” in 2005
should still be relatively quick. but by contrast, this celeron chip is far,
far, far, far, far slower than even the performance of my ancient 8088-based
tandy laptop.

i am enormously upset with this advertising ploy, and i assure you, that had
you called me when requested, i would have let you know this in no uncertain
terms.

i understand that these chips are easily replaced. i want an upgrade to a
full-capacity intel pentium 4 chip running at 2.8Ghz. i do not want to pay
the full price for a second chip, since the first was so unsatisfactory, but i
can understand if you insist that i pay the difference in cost. though, in
fact, i think it would be a matter of good will for you to simply send the
appropriate chip for no charge.

i expect to remain a dell customer, because your machines are so reliable.
but i think you should straighten out your act in this regard, take
responsibility for misleading advertising, and correct this problem at your own
expense. please remember, i have always before ordered the highest end chip
available at the time of my purchase, and regret trying to economize on my
daughter’s system, though had your advertising been more forthright, this misfortune
could have been avoided.

yours, very unhappily,

neil

I would just like to say this as a former Dell employee. I personally don’t buy computers from dell with the exception of rack servers for my office. I don’t buy them because I can build them myself. I read a post earlier that struck as a little bit on the oblivious side, the person made the comment that sheesh I received my new laptop and the power cable wasn’t hooked up. I would say sheesh dell ships thousands of those laptops a day what is the chance that during shipping and we know how gentle ups, airborne, and FedEx are with our packages that the power cable was jarred loose. I started with dell when they were the little guy and left last year when I retired at 39 thank you stock options…… What I really am trying to say is that dell has the monopoly on the computer industry. I will give you an example my little brother works for one of those really sunny south eastern states famous for spring break. Well that state along with most states in the U.S. buy millions of computers from dell and nothing will change that. I know all of this sounds a little biased towards DELL but I have worked in almost every division from sales, tech support, marketing, and engineering and have seen some really great things that DELL has done granted not everything was great and that one thing was the short out sourcing stint to India for technical support. The thing that I must say and I hope you people out there can understand this because you guys seem like small thinkers and not to mention socialists is that accurate studies have been done that show that one person in 38,000 people that buy a DELL ever have to call in with a problem….. So my question to you is why is DELL going to waste its time trying to make you happy keep in mind that every time you call in there is a log of the conversation created so that customer service rep can see every time you have been rude and used foul language to a Dell employee so tell me this why should they care about you and your problem…. Dell makes every attempt to please the customer as long as the customer doesn’t lose it on the phone. I will also go as far as to ask you to look deep and ask yourself if I had a DELL and an hp that were 5 years old and I called both companies who would help me troubleshoot a problem and who would laugh at me after the warranty has expired???? People don’t understand that when you buy an HP you get a warranty but when that warranty runs out they won’t answer a single question about that system until you pay 20-30 dollars. I had a guy tell me one time he was on the phone this was in 2002 I believe and this guy had a machine we sold him back in 95 and the info wasn’t readily available to work on the issue he had so some of us older employees got together and conference called this guy back and work on his issue and this happens everyday. I believe that people who have problems with DELL are complete idiots now you have to understand what I mean by this. I have only seen something that was completely DELLS fault maybe five times the usual culprit is something is damaged on jarred loose during shipping. The other problem is instead of working with DELL to resolve the issue the user calls in and try’s to go on a tirade through every manager in DELL, but that’s impossible and a complete waste of time. People are generally intimidated when they call so to compensate they try to yell and belittle to rep they get on the phone and that’s fine those guys love calls like that, but the customer try’s to yell and argue to just tell the rep what they want and they get even angrier when the rep doesn’t lose their cool the slightest bit. The long and short of it is you guys can do your supposed bad PR but you cant stop the DELL machine because just remember that for every one of you there are 38,000 loyal DELL customers who deal with problems like adults and not like cry babies and you wonder why DELL wasn’t in a hurry to help you… I am so glad to see you guys switched to apple we used to have an acronym for you guys it was PWCFOW people who couldn’t figure out windows. I am glad that you guys found something that was simple enough for you, because I believe that even stupid people are entitled to a computer they can figure out.

Dell’s quality is a result of customer demands for lower prices. Lower prices drives cheaper parts. Would you pay $100 more for a better machine even if it was $100 more than the market price for a similar box from another vendor with inferior service and quality? For most people the answer sadly is NO. Price rules – you get what you pay for.

Wow – What a great site.

I’m a professional computer support specialist. I currently work in my spare time as a freelance repair person, and have over the past 5 years made many recommendations for the Dell product.

However, over the past 2 weeks, I have been working with one of those customers who purchased a new Dimension 4700 in Feb. 2004. This system had a hard drive failure about a 3 weeks ago, and when the customer spent nearly 1 hour on the phone with an over seas support person, they were told that it was a ‘software problem’ and that Dell could not assist the customer any longer with the problem. The customer was advised to reinstall Windows.

Of course I got a call. I verified the HD was bad using Dell’s own diagnostics, and spent nearly 45 mintues using Dell’s support chat to try and get the HD replaced. I ended up being asked to reinstall Windows – I gave up on Chat.

I then called, and after 20 minutes on hold, got a technician that I was able to barely understand. He authorized the HD replacement and sent it on it’s way.

When I received the HD I started the install process, only to find that the customer never received their Resource CD. So, I had no network drivers avaliable to get the NIC up and running.

I tried the support chat again (not sure why) and found yet another technican that couldn’t adequatly understand the English language. I was told that they would send the CD ‘When it was needed’. I told the rep that I needed it now. Again, they would send it ‘when it was needed’. We repeated that exercise in futility for a few more times, and I was directed to a website where I could download the drivers. Again I tried to say that I needed the Resource CD, and again – they would send it ‘when it was needed’. I ended the chat. . .

Now I try the phone support option – it worked last time. I called 5 times, each time ending up somehow in the Axim support queue even though I was responding correctly to the ‘voice activated’ prompts every time. The 5th call, I decided to wait (15 minutes) to talk to an Axim support representative, and get transfered to the Dimension support queue. I continued to wait in the Dimension support queue for another 20 minutes, while I listened to the recorded messages that tell me to make sure I have my monitor plugged in, and to restart my computer – or visit their worthless support website.

Finally I got a representative on the phone and requested the Restore CD. Unbelievably – my request was granted (call time is now: 45 minutes) and I was asked to hold while the ‘dispatch number’ was generated.

In the end – I got the CD (That should have shipped with the computer in the first place).

Dell managed to save about 25 cents by not sending this customer the resource CD, but in the end, they will lose hundreds of customers. I will never recommend that a non-business customer purchase from Dell. If their business support doesn’t continue to improve I’ll never recommend business customers either.

Personally – I have owned 3 Dell computers, 2 Axim’s and purchased many other accessories from them. I have worked for a K12 school district where I purchased over 500 Dell computers over a 2 year period. I have recommended (and as a result sold for Dell) many computers to my support customers, family, and friends – all of which I will cease to do until things change.

Thier product is slipping in the face of fierce competition, and their ability to listen to the customer has all but disappeared. Support is virtually non-existent for non-techie consumers. Dell’s stock value is slipping (I have liquidated all my shares) and I’m afraid things just don’t look good.

Mr. Dell – if you are reading this, and you see some strange scraggly homeless man on the streets of Round Rock with a sign saying ‘the end is near’ don’t mistake what his message is intended to mean. His message is not meant for sinners – it’s meant for Dell’s management, and more specifically you Mr. Dell.

Failure to regain sight of what made Dell the huge success that it has been, will lead to Dell becoming the Hewlett Packard of the 21st Century.

And that my friend would be a terrible fate for such a successful college drop out.

Good luck -

Andy

I had a similar experience. I called customer service (in India I guess) and got bounced all around. They have a script and if you deviate from that script they dont know what to do and they just pass you along. I spend hours and hours and hours. Finally I called Texas, and my issue was resolved but it took 2 MONTHS. I WILL NEVER BUY ANOTHER DELL PRODUCT AS LONG AS I LIVE.

Bought E-510 Nov. 2005 via phone order. Most bizzare consumer experience I’ve ever had. After being cut-off three times I finally placed an order after the third rep. I talked to, and was cut off from, called me back. Now I wish she hadn’t and I’d gone to someone else for my PC needs. I gave nothing more than my SS# to them, they supposedly ran a credit check on me, approved it and the PC was shipped the same day. I gave no credit card # or anything else allowing them to directly bill me. The unit showed up and worked fine for about a week then all Dellhell broke loose. The CD/RW drive has major problems and seems to be destroying all CDs I try in it. I talked to a tech name “Daniel” for two hours and, after adamantly stating that it was a software problem, referred me to a help-line wanting my credit card#. It’s a warranty machine! At that point I gave up for the day. I’m going to try tech support again but after reading all the other blocs it’s obvious what I’m in for. Thank God I haven’t paid them a dime for this lemon and they don’t have my CC#. They might have just “given away” one of their lemons to an ex-customer who now has learned not to buy OEM but to purchase locally from a build master….

Dear Mr. Jarvis:

I just got off the phone with your folks in India for the I don’t know how many times this year call about my son’s Pocket DJ. The thing broke about 3 months after I bought it for him in 2004. He is now on his FOURTH REFURBISHED POCKET DJ.

Dear Mr. Jarvis. I am so very very weary of these Sunday afternoon dealings with Dell in which I have to spend hours hooking up with the right technical support person who never believes my son and I know what we are talking about. They make us go over the same exact tests we just performed ourselves, we argue for an hour over sending another refurbished DJ (duh, I just came to find out today they have no authority to send a new one) and for cripes sake I am not going through this anymore.

Do you not think four times is enough? My son is 17 years old. He is fastidious with his belongings and I know he takes care of his DJ. You are sending us someone else’s broken down piece of junk and enough is enough. I cannot tell you the ugly feelings I have about your company from this experience and will never recommend to anyone to use your products (including my laptop).

I would like to know how this can be resolved because I will not accept another refurbished DJ. I am NOT going through this every two months for years to come and I do not think you would find this acceptable either.

My Case Number is 119888210.

Thank you. Anastasia Ellis

I was a buyer and Customer Services manager for a 3000plus organisation that switched to Dell two years ago for strategic and economic reasons (alignment of a standard desktop globally). I am no small thinker as Joshua says, I am looking from a perspective of purchasing 1000 plus machines from Dell yearly and quite frankly the quality of service and the product is appalling:

1) Account mangement structures constantly changing with a focus on box shifting not service
2) Outsourced scripted Helpdesks with poor command of English and little understanding of customers aptitudes
3) Poor quality: substandard motherboards and harddrives
4) Acknowledgement of above only after putting on pressure after forming a User group of three similar companies experiencing the same problems
5) No proactive approach to supplying business with replacement parts, meaning my internal customers are equally pissed off about reactive management of issues

Oh and in contradiction of Joshuas statement when HP shipped out a batch of PCs with faulty PSUs they at least sent the replacements out prior to them failing

Dell was the worst mistake we made as a business. The Total Cost of Ownership has increased the real costs passed the economic benefit of purchasing their kit in the first place.

The saga continues…boutht my new Dell Dimension E310 with Pentium 4, 1Gb RAM, added SBC Yahoo DSL (big mistake!!), got explorer.exe hard errors, blue screen of death STOP on Windows start, etc., etc., etc. Talked to software, they said hardware maybe? talked to hardware, they said definitely software. After eight hours and many phone calls to nice Indian people reading scripts to me, finally got a person to say “we’ll send you a new hard drive, not refurbished, and replacement memory”. Nice guy from BankTech shows up with 512Mb memory, no drive, etc. In the interim, I have discovered that blue screen of death is directly related to use of SBC Yahoo DSL desktop software….Eight hours of work and phone calls, listening to scripts, missing every second or third syllable due to lousy phone connection….I don’t know how many phone calls and how many people I talked to… Obviously, Dell SUX, SBC Yahoo DSL SUX, but if I bought from HP or Gateway, would the experience been any better? Probably not, alas.

I couldn’t even get a reply from Dell when I asked for further information on one of their products that I wanted to buy.
I didn’t buy the product because I thought it would be safe to assume that I wouldn’t get a reply after I bought, if I had problems.

i bought a new dell xps 7 or 8 months ago. had it only one month the hard drive goes bad. called tech suppoort they sent me a new one so i could install it myself they charged me around $240.00 for the hard drive. it was refurbised not new. they said they would give me credit to my dell preferred account when i sent the old one back in but they never did. their interst is so high i will never get it paid off. the intrest they are charging me is 30.56%. the computer was $1497.00 i still owe about that much on it. been paying for it for about 7 or 8 months now. this is my first dell pc. i always had good luck out of hp and good tech support.

hi i am convinced ive been slammed i just don’t know why?
my cell phone home phone and internet access have been hijacked. i fear id fraud. but have not yet rec’d inproper billing.
but in the past few months wehave hurricanes auto accidents
and my poor sick old mother has run out off money. i looked at her pharmasy bills last knight . now’ i suspect possible medicare fraud. my mind is reeling and i don’t know were to turn
ps i cancelled 4 credit cards also
also purchased 2 computers from dell for christmas and they arived limited accsess with config to require network access to
surf the net iff this is what big business big brother and civil
rights has come too i know i need to say my pray because
the end is near !

Me, too, have had some terrible experiences with Dell Customer “Support”.

YOU TOO CAN MAKE IT THROUGH DELL’S CUSTOMER “SUPPORT”!

The situation in Europe is a little bit different than in the US, but generally this should work. It rests on the following assumption:

1. The general Customer Support personnel is call center cattle, not too savvy about (English) language and your specific system
2. They read through scripted cue cards. If you deviate from that: transfer hell!
3. If you follow the successful cue card “path”, at the end they will possibly “validate” whatever service you want from them. Obviously, not every possible defect can be solved that way, but maybe you can get a technician/exchange part on your way.
4. If you need to send your computer in and you follow the right “path”, the technician will not examine the machine in detail. He will simply exchange the parts declared as faulty by CS and send the machine back to you.
5. Somebody collects all the information of those cue cards on a website.

Here are some “hints”

1. THE OPENING OF THE MACHINE
CS: “Please unscrew the screw bla bla bla bla and bla”
You: “I am totally unable to do this because of [medical condition]”
This helped in one case, but maybe the operator was just being nice. Needs to be
confirmed.

2. THE DIAGNOSTIC TOOL
This (rather stupid) testing tool responds with a number of codes to possible hardware issues. Loading the tool can be a major headache. Somebody should post the codes, so you can simply state the correct answers to the CS and get to the next “level” on their cue card game.

3. 3Rd PARTY RAID
If they are near you, you might want to pay a visit to your 3rd party technician company. 1st of all, you might get a technical savvy person not just a replacement clown. Tell them about your support issue, that CS told you to go there, tell them your case number (can be any number) and something that looks like a printout from an official DELL website. You’d be amazed of the wonders that a helpful person can do to your computer. They might even have replacement parts around! Good acting skills required, but worked in one case.

etc, etc. Moral: As DELL seems to adopt old communist food distribution schemes, maybe the consumer should adapt to similar ways to fool that system.

After reading this page, I will never, ever buy a DELL again (I thought, it was a local problem, but…!!)

Adding to the chorus:

At this point, Dell thinks of us as cattle. The inspirons are ‘throw away’ PCs designed to last just past the warranty period. I back up my statement with my Inspiron 5100 and the famous motherboard with detaching components (yes, the machine shuts down if I gently raise one corner). Oh yeah, the forums are full of people with this problem. My daughter’s new Inspiron 1150 has a bad wireless NIC and suspect battery after 9 months (again mirrored by many on the forums). My new Inspiron 9300 (yes I WAS a Dell man!!) had to have new memory after 6 months – (a problem again echoed by forum users) – and taking over 12 calls to fix – because I couldn’t get them to move past their dumb scripts which had me trying to restore windows. I also had to fix an ‘out of the box’ keyboard driver myself – the techs were clueless (glad I knew to update a driver and didn’t follow them on ‘repairing windows’).

On the other hand, I had good luck with a Latitude purchased by my company and with my son’s 8400 desktop. Some of their stuff still has reasonable quality. The problem for future purchases is that we feel like we’re gonna be rolling the dice. So Dell is REALLY shooting themselves in the foot by selling junk.

What we see is a company that is working on razor thin consumer-ware margins, especially for their bargain lines. If they took the time to validate the design and quality, they would cost more – and wouldn’t be bargain basement. We have been voting for this approach with our wallets. But as we realize that our time is money, and these cheap systems end up costing far more in time and trouble, we can stop buying them.

Thank goodness for these blogs – because as educated consumers, we will ‘vote’ for better, maybe higher priced systems. I am now voting for IBM / Lenovo, like the guy above.. My T-series has been bulletproof (echoed by forums) !! Don’t know that they’ll be the best for evermore – and I won’t recommend them forever, but they are best for now. $100 more up front versus $1000′s in time later is an easy choice!

Dell is making poor choices by selling sub-par, quick-to-market, easy-to-package junk to people who they think won’t know better. Makes the term ‘business ethics’ an oxymoron. The only way to change this is for us to know better – by writing it here and by spreading the word. It starts here and proceeds to friends and associates. Don’t be ashamed to let your friends learn from your mistakes!

Dell is really..hell… to deal with. A year ago I purchased a Dell. They sent me the wrong monitor. Called and they sent me another monitor just like the first. Called again and they said that I would have to send one of the monitors back before they could send another. Left on hold till lie disconnected. Called back and requested the entire system to be sent back. Recieved UPS return numbers and UPS picked up. Now all of this happened within 8 days. Called in March and account was zeroed out. In October collection agency called where Dell said I owed them $70. Cehcked credit bureau only to find out I had a zero balance and paid on time. Collection agency continued to call and Dell then sent me a bill. No explanation just a bill. Called and they couldn’t tell me why but was on credit report now that it has gone to collections. I sent Dell a check with a very nice letter. Now I have in hand a statement from Dell whereby I have a credit balance in excess of $105. Called Dell and was told that I could only use the credit for their merchandise. WHAT A RIPOFF….NO WONDER HE HAS ALL THE MONEY.

Mr. Dell, after my trip to Dell Hell I found this web site. I can now understand why Gateway is a growing company. To make a long story short your policy on returning a lemon laptop sucks. You sell my daughter a piece of crap and when I call to request a refund and this is after you have worked on the laptop twice I am told NO it is not going to happen.I was still being nice at this point and asked to speak to this supervisors supervisor, guess what I am told? I would not have belived this if I did not hear it. The supervisor that I was talking to Stated ” MY supervisor does not take phone calls” I asked who else can I speak to and he stated no one I am the supervisor I asked him does he speak for the CEO of Dell and he stated yes. Does any one know Michael Dell ( screw the public ) address in Austin?

Just in case anyone wanted it here is Michael Dell’s email address

Michael@dell.com

I don’t know if you will receive a reply but you can sure try.

Lisa, you are certainly NOT the only one that has been screwed by Dell. I bought one of their mid-range pcs last summer and have had nothing but problems. These problems were exagerrated due to the quality of the customer service department.

we bought a insprion 1000 laptop and its crap. i called customer service andgit treated so very badly, and noone could help me and they would trasnfer to me to other departments and they were no help. dell puter are crap. they dont make our model and whe we did get it they sent the wrong drivers disc so what help is that to me? i will never buy a dell again . i would rather go to wal-mart and get a hp. ty

Call the Attorney Generals office in your state and ask them if they could send a letter on your behalf telling Dell to fix it or take it back. At the least you can ask them what you can and cant do.

I ordered the Axim X51V special for $448 from Dell last week. I also ordered the $32 aluminum case and $35 3-in-1 travel kit. When I told Dell CustomerCare that I wanted to return the case (because it was too heavy) and the travel kit, I was told that I would receive a credit of $24 for the case and $26.70 for the travel kit. The reason was that the $20 coupon thatI had used was divided up between the $448 pda system and the accessories. This makes no sense since the $20 coupon was good on any purchases over $200, which the $448 system qualified for. So now that I’m returning the 2 accessories, I’m receiving much less than what I paid for them. Had I known this, I would have ordered the $448 separately and used the coupon just on that. When I threatened to return everything and just place a new order (minus the 2 accessories)so that the $20 discount can be applied to just the system, I was then told that there would be 10% re-stocking charge, even though I receive the order 3 days ago. I’ll never order from DELL again even though I’ve been a DELL customer for more years than I can remember! I wasted too much time on the phone and was bounced around from one person to the next. The service reps acted like they would try to help but they were useless. There is deception going on in Dell’s sales and service tactics.

Can someone please give me the address of Michael Dell or someone in power so that I can send him a letter about the poor customer service at his company? Maybe I’m just wasting my time. I’ll just tell all my family and friends NOT to buy Dell.

Maybe our problem seems small compared to some of the above but then Dell doesn’t seem to want to deal even with the simpler problems. We asked for advice about our Dell printer because after using it only a few times the printing appears faded. We followed all the procedures from the manual with no change in the quality of the print. When we contacted Dell Service, after providing them with all the relevant order no. etc ; they then wrote back to us to say they can’t respond to us because we don’t live in the country in which the computer was purchased. Our Dell laptop and printer were purchased in the UK but we travel (hence the laptop) and are currently in Turkey. When we tried to get help in Turkey- still not possible. We can’t understand it. We have been travelling around the globe (by boat) and other companies give service wherever you are. Why did we give away our old Hyperdata laptop and Canon printer? After eight years still going strong!

Against the advice of this blog (and many others) I just purchased my first Dell. To some, it seems like I am putting my head in the noose and hoping the chair beneath my feet does not break. I assure you my thinking is slightly more calculated than that.

I have had some bad experiences with computers in the past (forget dell, eMachines, compaq and HP are the devil) and, upon deciding to purchase this computer I wondered, “how bad could it be?” Undoubtedly, these words sound ominous to many of Mr. Jarvis’ loyal readers: those who have endured “Dell hell”. However, my feeling is, at worst, I will be in a computer situation similar to the one I am in currently.

I have had machines that would freeze on you sooner than it would play solitaire. One computer that I owned had a possessed floppy drive that would inexplicably start trying to read my “A:” drive at random moments throughout the day. BUT, I have always been able to restore them to working order. Than again, I am one of the lucky ones. Any software difficulties are quickly remedied by any one of my computer saavy friends. Other than that, I warranty-up to replace defective parts.

In the end, my greatest concern is price. And, even those here who have no shortage of negative things to say about Dell, cannot seem to disprove the notion that Dell, of every major computer company, offers the lowest price. As mentioned earlier, I have paid top dollar for the privilege of being screwed over by almost every other major computer company you can name (excluding Apple) and would find it almost a relief not to feel as if I put a second mortgage on my house for an exceptionally large paperweight.

Perhaps my opinion is a tad defeatest, even nihilistic, but it is the truth. I believe that, wherever you go, there are going to be people getting cheated out of their hard earned dollars by multi-national corporations. It is a Twenty-First Century phenomenon and, I think, people are just going to have to get used to it.

Regardless, I appreciate what Mr. Jarvis is trying to do here (on his blog). In creating a body of consumers, determined to hold a faceless company accountable for its actions, we understand that we not entirely powerless. I think a quote, often attributed to Voltaire, says it best:

“I disagree with what you have to say but will fight to the death to protect your right to say it.”

P.S. I dont know if this has been said, but isnt it a little strange that a preponderance of the complaints against Dell are from laptop users? I wonder if unreliability is attributable to Dell or if it’s just the nature of the beast…so to speak.

Hi Jeff -

Just this morning I sent out the following to about 30 of my friends. Hope you can use it because Dell sucks.

_______________________________________________
This e-mail is being sent to encourage everyone to boycott Dell computers. I know they are seen as the best of the PCs, but let me tell you a couple of things about them.

Our daughter, Anne, just left this past Tuesday to spend the spring semester of her junior year in college studying in Paris. Last Saturday, three days before she left, the screen on her Dell laptop, which was purchased last May, went out. Frantic phone calls resulted in her (actually me) having to arrange for it to be picked up by DHL to go in for repairs.When both Anne and I tried to arrange for the computer to be sent directly from the factory to Paris we were rebuffed. The official Dell argument was some bullshit about import-export laws preventing them from shipping it overseas.

Join me in boycotting Dell and spread the word.

Mike Wilkinson, you dumbshit. Any idiot knows that product cannot be shipped overseas due to export compliance laws that the federal government mandates for technology purchases. Product purchased in Europe can be shipped within Europe and in the Mideast can be shipped in the Mideast, etc.. That is why Dell maintains 7 manufacturing facilities; To comply with export and expedite product. Quit whining about your daughter’s computer and THINK before you speak. Send it to your home and FEDEX it to your daughter. Noone follows your boycott, they just know that Dell did not become a multibillion dollar company by screwing customers. They continue to grow in the double digits.

After my experience today with Dell’s tech support, I will never again buy or reccomend anything sold by Dell.

Thanks Jeff, I can see you are not the only one. Also there is something in disruptivenews.com

dear dell thanks for nothing i have contacted your offic e several times i now have a 1600$ lemon i am paying by your dell credit but i am sending your system back and credit rating be damned! never will buy a dell again

READ THIS ONE
I wanted to buy a Canon digital Rebel EOS (awesome camera by the way) so I called Dell and thought I could get a deal on a notebook. I wound up getting a latitude 510 with the camera. After 10 days with my laptop, I had developed about a 1.5″ vertical line about 1/3 of the way across the screen from the left. I used to work on desktops and I know that stuff happends so I called customer support and the rollercoaster started. I went through the foreign phone loops that always transfer you to the beginning of the phone call. Once I got through to a laptop helpdesk in Urspackisindistan, (I think that’s the place I was transfered to) and the said they didn’t know about the Latitude line. I was told by one person that I should have gotten the 24hr gold or platinum (some precious metal) service if I wanted 24 hour customer support from MCSE’s, because some of the other 24hr helpers were just reading textbooks or inept. I have to say that I don’t usually rant and rave, and the people who tried to help me were nice but undertrained, so I just kept asking questions. I found out that it was a hardware issue so customer service said I had to ship it back for service.
I am fine with this policy because I opted out of the on-site repair because I travel to many different jobsites for my business, running high end computer networking, security, and A/V wiring in new housing. I bought the camera, which I can’t plug enough- CANON DIGITAL REBEL EOS, and the laptop to photograph wiring layouts, speaker maps, and other work related issues. In the middle of resolving the issue I went on a family vacation where I had to spend more time on the phone. This was frustrating but I understand that We as consumers can’t beat ourselves up about phone loops and time on hold because, unfortunately, it’s just the way it is and if it isn’t fix by the time my kids are grown (now 2yr old and one arriving 2/23/06) I might take on that battle but I just want what I paid for.
The big problem is the “trained mentallity” of customer support reps to push the blame on you. “You should have gotten the extended warranty” or “…24 hour gold service” or “…on-site repair”. I was even told I should have gotten a better video card even though I only use the computer for storing photos.
So I am on vacation and the Dell rep says I need to ship the computer back, which is fine with me but I knew that I was within the 21 day return policy and I asked if I could be shipped a replacement. First the rep said I was past the 21 days, fortunately I had my receipt saying it had been 19 days. Then she said I should have gotten the on-site warranty, and I kept explaining I understand the policy but I had the right to return it and I even offered to but the next system and return the old one for a refund when it got here. Finally they said they would ship a new one and I could return the old.
I was satisfied with the deal and even bought a laser printer through Dell a week later. What I wasn’t happy with was the new laptop had a DVD-RW that would barely read a new cd. If you have dealt with computers at any point of your life, you know that a cd-rom has to be almost shattered before it won’t work in a drive. Luckily I still had the old one and I swapped drives.
My next problem was that I couldn’t obtain an IP address from a LAN line so I spent hours on the phone getting transferred until I came across a nice “gold” tech whom helped me for a couple hours, until we came to the conclusion that I just had to wipe the system clean and start over. NOTE—I don’t download anything on my laptop, install minimal software, and never open email attchs that I am not sure of even from family, so you can rule out almost all user error.
I reinstalled wins again and I am back in business until, uh oh, what’s this new line appearing on my screen that looks just like the one on my old laptop. OH CRAP, here we go again. This is the same problem I had before and it is a different computer. It’s not like they could have shipped the same computer back to me because I saw the new and old side by side.
I haven’t sent this 3 month old computer back yet because I wanted to see if others have had bars going through their screens. Let me know if you do and let me know if I am out of line asking for a different model because this is the same problem I have had with two latitude 510′s. You never know, maybe Mike D. will make it right and I will be the first to say thank you and let others know, I’ll let you know when he doesn’t.

I guess Dell isn’t listening. I just read today they are hiring another 5000 personel in India for a new call center for a grand total of 15000.

Surely we can find Americans in need of work to fill these jobs. I am convinced that part of the decline in customer satisfaction is a result of off shoring. I’m not sure if those in some other countries take the same amount pride in their work as Americans.

It seems to me that Dell produced a much better product before deciding to off shore services and support . Now I guess it’s all about the bottom line and Dell’s inability to manage doing business in America.

10:46:15 PMSystemWelcome xxxxxxxxxx…
10:46:15 PMSystemConnecting to server. Please wait…
10:46:15 PMSystemThank you for using DELL Chat, a representative will be with you soon.
10:46:15 PMSystemInitial Question/Comment: video card
10:49:24 PMSystemYou are now being connected to an agent. Thank you for using DELL Chat
10:49:24 PMSystemConnected with Hemanth_0178831
10:49:33 PMHemanth_0178831Thank you for contacting DELL Consumer Hardware Warranty Support Chat. My name is Hemanth.
10:49:35 PMHemanth_0178831While I review your question, let me inform you that you might get an invitation to participate in a survey at the end of this session. You would be asked to rate our interaction on a scale of 1 to 9 with 9 being the best. In order to participate in the survey, you must close the chat by hitting the “Exit ” button. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
10:49:35 PMHemanth_0178831May I have the name , e-mail address and telephone number registered with us while I review your query ?
10:50:17 PMYou xxxxxxxxxxx
10:50:25 PMYou xxxxxxxxxxxx
10:50:32 PMYou xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
10:50:56 PMHemanth_0178831Hi xxxxxx .
10:50:59 PMHemanth_0178831Thank You very much for the information.Please give me two minutes while I review your question.
10:51:41 PMHemanth_0178831Hi xxxxx .
10:51:49 PMHemanth_0178831How may I help you ?
10:51:56 PMYouyes
10:52:23 PMYouOk short story, called a few weeks ago and had basically diagnosed bad video card.
10:52:36 PMYouafter going thru all the steps
10:53:01 PMYouJust now had time to take the cae apart some more and prepare to take the video card out
10:53:11 PMYoucase, not cae
10:53:34 PMYoufollowing the instruction manual i printed online
10:54:01 PMYousays to take the four 6.5 mm screws out, then lift the card out
10:54:33 PMYouThere’s my problem. 4 screws were never installed. Card is loose, floating
10:54:45 PMHemanth_0178831Ok
10:54:59 PMYouI’d like to get my 4 screws so I can fix
10:55:50 PMYoucause once I reseated the vid card all is well. Just needs to be secured/screwed down
10:56:20 PMHemanth_0178831 xxxxxx , I will not be able to dispatch any part as your laptop is out of contract . I will give you the part number for the screws.
10:56:46 PMYouBUT you never put the screws in to begin with!
10:57:34 PMYouI paid for em already. they aren;t there
10:58:52 PMHemanth_0178831It may be that the screws may have fallen down during usage .
10:59:27 PMYouNope.
11:01:00 PMYouAll 4 of them, just fell down? Down where? Out? Come on be serious.
11:01:31 PMHemanth_0178831I would love to send out the screws to you , however since the system is out of contracts my system will not allow me to create a dispatch.
11:01:46 PMYouOk get a supervisor
11:02:12 PMHemanth_0178831The warranty on your laptop was until 04-24-2004.
11:02:40 PMYouSo what? You failed to properly install the video card?
11:02:52 PMYouCan I speak with a supervisor?
11:02:56 PMHemanth_0178831Sure , Kindly be on the line for three to four minutes .
11:03:18 PMYouThank you
11:03:36 PMYouCan you give me the part number in the meantime?
11:03:37 PMSystemYou are being transferred to another Agent. Please stand by…
11:03:37 PMSystemHemanth_0178831 has left this session!
11:03:40 PMSystemYou are now being connected to an agent. Thank you for using DELL Chat
11:03:40 PMSystemConnected with SUP_Mohammed_0138028
11:05:16 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028Hi xxxxxxx My name is Mohammed i am the supervisor
11:07:02 PMYouHow come you can’t ship me 4 screws that you failed to install when the computer was originally built?
11:07:27 PMYouwithout charging me? You know its kinda the principle of the thing now
11:09:15 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028I am sorry xxxxxx your system is out of warranty and we cannot ship it once the system is out of warranty
11:10:24 PMYougive me the part number then? AND have someone who lives in the US phone me.
11:13:02 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028 xxxxxx please make a note of the part number 4911U
11:14:01 PMYougot it. Now as I consider this abysmal service, I need to speak with someone in the US
11:14:47 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028you will have to call 800-357-3355 to order the parts
11:15:18 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028this is nu,number for our spare parts sales
11:15:39 PMYoucan do, but I want to speak with someone higher up than you and who resides in the US.
11:16:27 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028we do not have personal extension , how ever i will escalate this to my superiors
11:16:33 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028so they can call you
11:17:05 PMYouThat is what I am requesting. Someone higher up and inthe US to call me
11:17:15 PMYou xxx-xxx-xxxx
11:18:22 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028i am not sure form US I am trying to help you the best possible way by escalating this
11:19:59 PMYouOk then maybe whatever person you have call me can then provide the info when they call me.
11:21:03 PMYouI’ll await the phone call. Never thought getting the 4 screws which DELL failed to install would be such a problem. What poor service and quality.
11:21:18 PMYouDo you know when I might expect a phone call?
11:24:02 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028you receive a call Friday or on Monday since senior authorities do not work on Saturday and Sunday
11:24:51 PMYouFriday or Monday wil be fine. Thank you. Do I have a case number or anything in case I never receive that call?
11:25:28 PMSUP_Mohammed_xxxxxxxxxxx please make a note of the case reference number
11:27:45 PMYouOk I must say this is an amazingly poor response to such an obvious manufacturing mistake. All over 4 screws DELL left out of the machine when it was built. Good evening. I’ll await a callback
11:29:18 PMSUP_Mohammed_0138028I understand your frustration , i will definitely escalate it and will ensure you receive a call back

———————————————————————–
resolution? Are you kidding?

It has been over 3 months now,i first wrote on this page in November last year regarding a Dell laptop i purchaes. I am still waiting for a refund. i have had no formal apology from Dell in any way or form.

I have resigned myself to buying a Panasonic Toughbook,what a machine,no problesm whatsoever. My question is, will i ever see my money again from dell or are they investing my 700 pounds on training indians in india that cannot understand nor speak english,all they do is put you on hold and get paid for it. A message for Mr Dell,do you have a job for me?

Mr hanif Loony(Lonat) Indians in India can not only understand the intricacies of English but if you care

- The creator of Pentium Chip is an Indian, Vinod Dahm.
- The founder and creator of Hotmail is an Indian, Sabeer Bhatia.

So is Dell’s quality bad – yes at times. They have to manage a huge number of notebooks and things can’t be perfect. Yes, they should look more at being more concerned about customers. But will Mr. Dell give you a job? Maybe you should ask Vinod Khosla – The co-founder of Sun Microsystems he is an Indian too. Sorry you Mr Hanif Loona? don’t have a job.

I have had nothing but aggravation with dell. Their idea of support is testing your endurance with an automated voice system that connects you to the wrong people..

Not so dear Mr. Dell,

While a graduate student in Texas A&M, I was looking at your firm as a dream concern to work for. Those were the days when your stock price was at an alllll time high of $45. And as the saying goes, be careful what you are wishing for, as it might come true.

And it came…the offer letter from Dell. I was flattered, went to cloud 9. I accepted the wonderful offer, and readied to file for my H1B visa, because my hiring manager Craig and my HR Jennifer wanted me “rightaway”. Not wanting to loose an inch of ground, I was ready for accepting to commute everyday between Austin and College Station for my last 2 months of graduate school.

And then the bad news came…before I could get a list of documents required for my H1B filing from Dell lawyers (who took a cool 10 days and didnt give me any information), the H1B quota of 65,000 got filled for that year. Now, do I blame Mr. Bush or you for this? Ofcourse, you had nothing to do with this, so I totally cursed President Bush for his policies. Oh well, Dell is ofcourse one of the best companies to work for who take really good care of their employees. Well, prospective employees? Almost an employee…lets see about that.

When I enquired the next step and asked if Dell can wait 9 weeks, yes, 9 weeks within which I would get a work permit for 1 year through my student visa. To my shock, the immmmediate response I got was that Dell would withdraw their offer as they would need someone “right away”. My world just came down.

I picked myself up in a couple of days and maintained a polite face and tone to Craig & Jennifer, hoping that something would work out. My job search went on well, and 2 months later, I received my work permit and immediately called Dell to mention that I was ready to work. I got an offer letter pronto, with my sign on bonus increased by a whopping $2,000 (no, I did not miss a zero there) for the trauma I had undergone. I got call after call from 3 Managers and Sr. Managers convincing me that they “always wanted to hire me”, except the visa was a barrier.

Guess what, 1 hour before Dell made an offer, I received an equally competing offer from another reputed Fortune 100 concern, which I gladly negotiated using Dell’s offer and later on accepted. IF this is the way they treat their people, I am not sure what motivation there would be for anyone who works there. And if there isnt a motivation, the only thing that comes out of such workplaces would be junk. Well, thats my theory, but that what comes out there is junk is proven.

End of Chapter 1.

Begin Chapter 2.

Well, I am an avid photographer now, and saw a Canon 20D at Dell for $1199 for 2 days, called up and received a quote…decided the timing was not appropriate and dropped it there.

Two weeks later, I decide to check if I can get the same camera for the same price, and to my disbelief, a sales guy said he would be able to. Well, just for information, the price Dell sells it is at $1440. I asked him to go ahead and complete the deal for me and he put me on hold for a minute. 1 minute. 2 minutes…3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 30, 35, 45 minutes. At some infinite point of time, the call got rerouted to the sales queue again. Not wanting to miss the incredible price on the camera, I went through the queue and specifically said,” Eric from Oregon (the previous sales guy) offered the camera to me at $1199 and I was wanting to complete the deal, he put me on hold and I got lost in the cracks.”

Pat came the reply, “No sir, the lowest price we can offer in that camera is $1370.” I said, “Well, thats not what I heard, you can call up Eric and ask him, why dont we have a conference now?” The sales guy mentioned that he knew Eric from Oregon and agreed to conference and put me on hold, again. A minute later, he came back and said that Eric would not be able to offer it to me for that price, and the lowest he would be able to offer me was only $1370. Eric had conveniently decided to pass on the message through his buddy instead…why face a customer anyways?

I was furious already, but politely asked to be connected to a manager, to which John gladly forwarded me to an answering machine. I left a message, and thought I was done. But my heart didnt listen…I wanted to talk to a live person and get an explanation.

I called back, and this time, I reached the sales queue, explained the entire saga, and got the same response, lowest price is $1370. I requested to be connected to a manager, and the response was, “We do not have a manager on duty here, can you please call up customer service?” I was like…what? You dont have a manager on duty…wonderful. Had no choice, called up sales again, and got routed to a 4th guy.

This time, it was Mike, lovely music in the Dell wait queue, and then same story, same price, thankfully a manager now. The manager listened to me entirely and patiently, and then said he wont be able to offer it to the price initially mentioned and did not have an explanation to why the other rate was offered to me initially.

Well, they basically wont stand up to their own word. As simple as that. I was furious, but maintained my calm and politely replied that this is the worst I have ever faced and I will never get anything Dell again. Not even if it is a Canon make sold by Dell, I would pay the premium to buy it from Dell’s competitor.

YES, I WOULD PAY THE PREMIUM TO BUY IT FROM DELL’S COMPETITOR. AND NOT JUST ME, MY PHOTOGRAPHER FRIENDS, MY PHOTOGRAPHY CLUB MEMBERS AND EVERYONE AT MY WORKPLACE. ooops…to bad!

End of Chapter 2.

There better not be a Chapter 3…there wont be. There is no third time charm for Dell. And yes, this is my real name, and you can pick up the offer letter from your HR department.

My daughter’s laptop (she’s an architecture student) has been a living nightmare. We have had to have the cpu, heat sinc, motherboard and power module all replaced. Last night her hard drive crashed – while she was away…She has been told she is out of warranty (a mere 14 days) and will have to buy a new one. We have had it with Dell. Customer service is a joke, the India based customer support is another incredible source of frustration.

We have over 20 Dell computers (mix of laptops and pcs) at our office and they have been horrible.

Warning – Dell customer support after the sale is appalling. Good luck if you buy one.

Wow, I have 2 Dell’s at my house, the only reason I spent the money on them, was because they had “special” deals on them.. But, that was NOT worth the hell of customer service I had to go through, I was on the phone for 5 hours, and then another 3 JUST to see why my computer didn’t ship ontime. – This is not even counting the MANY MANY hours I, and my mother was on the phone trying to figure out why the computer randoml crashes (which, I already knew the anewser, but Dell didn’t seem to know, nor care), they transfered me all over hell and creation, and when I FINALLY reached someone who knew how to fix the problem, they wanted me to BUY a new CPU fan for my 4 month old computer… Wow.

Dells customer service is -Bad- should not even be allowed to treat customers this way, I really hope SOMETHING changes, before more of this crap keeps going on. I am, and have been outraged about their shitty customer service.

Luckly, I found this website, and I am SO happy! Others out there are sharing this information, and getting Dell known for their shitty ass support.

I Love you guys! lol,
Brian Gargery

Jeff,

How right you are. Not only bad customer service, but arrogant. I asked to talk to the boss of the person who wouldn’t help me, and I was told flat out no. Tried letters, etc and got nowhere.

In the last 2 years I’ve purchased 10 H-P’s. And told everyone I know not to buy DEll and why!

Class action suit against Dell for 5150/5160 may be in progress in Houston, Texas. Here’s the name/contact of the attorney.

Cory Fein
Caddell & Chapman
1331 Lamar #1070
Houston, TX 77010
713.751.0400
csf@caddellchapman.com

found at http://mtaulty.com/blog/(4vagbz45uh0vks55533yof45)/archive/2004/11/01/847.aspx

Check out the National Better Business Bureau’s report on Dell: http://www.centraltx.bbb.org/commonreport.html?bid=41453

I’ve spent about 5 hours on the phone trying to get a refund for a second monitor Dell sent me—when I only ordered one! Totally maddening!

The last one was a classic Dell experience, I know, because I worked for them before! I will not go in details how bad Dell Customer Service is and etc, but I just want all bloggers to know, Customer Service cannot be single handedly tied in with failure to get a system fixed, or failure to get warranty for a system out of warranty. All that can be summed up by the failure of Dell to employ Tech Support personnel who is smart enough or responsible enough to think out of their IT little brain that customer service or customer’s experience is the key to any company’s future. You can be a computer whiz fixing an issue within 2 minutes by if you speak or think like Beavis or Butthead, your 2 minutes is worth less than a penny.

Customer Service from Dell is not good, I definitely agree but other companies struggle as well, reason being you can’t and won’t be able to hire someone who speaks perfect local language (English in this discussion) who would take home a low pay and getting abused by angry customers like us.

You win some, you lose some. If one can afford higher priced goods, then Dell will certainly not be in the picture already, so if we buy Dell, live with it. At least there’s support. However, a key note to Dell – Please review the people managing your call centres, Customer Care to Tech Support, they are simply lack of the magic touch to delight your customers. I personally have stayed away from the brand and have since switched to clones, I built them myself, just like what Michael did 20 years ago.

Sony Laptop Battery – We are a distributor specializing in SONY Laptop Batteries, SONY Laptop DC Adapters,what we sell we guarantee that high quality and 100% OEM compatible! Order fast,ship fast!

Ordered a Dell computer in November of 2005. After 3 weeks, I had still not recieved. Tracking indicated my shipment was in Texas. I live in Virginia. Cancelled order and canceled account with Dell Financial Services.
Promptly recieved a bill from Dell for the entire order. $900+. Called Financial Services, they indicated I needed to call Customer Care. Called Customer Care. Credited account (or so I thought). Next month (Jan. 06), recieved bill from Dell. Repeated above process. Credited account (first credit was only for CPU, monitor still on bill). Numerous phone calls made to my house (even on Sunday and as early as 8:30am) from Dell Financial. Account delinquent, please remit payment. Went over entire story again. Was directed to call Customer Care. Not open on weekends. Contacted during the week. Supervisor will call you back. No word, so I call again. Supervisor called you. Really, when? Well she didn’t leave a message. Then how would I know she called? This goes on for a few more weeks. Early March 2006 (the 6th, I believe) contact made again with Customer Care. All taken care of…. (Imagine my being leary at that statement). And then yesterday, March 23, 2006. I receive a call from a company called Encore. This is a collection agency calling in attempt to retreive a balance owed to Dell by me for $89.00. HUH? Spoke with Lanisha, an Encore agent, who got the full story. She’ll call me back. Today, March 24, 2006 I recieve in the mail a collection notice from Encore. Ok, guess it’s back to Customer Care. Oh that balance was credited as of March 6, 2006. Really? Then why am I getting calls and letters from Encore. Transferred, Dell Collections Dept. Voice mail. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you.
Ok, no computer, numerous phone calls, collections calls at 8:30am on Sundays and now we’ll go screw up your credit for a product you didn’t recieve. Is there a supervisor I can speak with….no, I didn’t think so…. HELP!!!!!

I had to reinstall the XP Professional CD for factory settings and I found out although the CD I paid for and came with my notebook says “XP Professional” on the the label, the contents is “Windows XP Home” and I cannot install the CD because my notebook is an XP Professional. The “Product Key” from the back of my notebook when I tried to enter it just to see if it will work on the wrong content CD but it doesn’t even work. I contacted different Dell departments and I have been passed around and others hang up on me because I had an expired “Service Tag” and expired “Express Service Code”. Their representatives refused to give me an answer why the contents of the CD they sent me says XP Home when I paid for XP Professional. For me to have an answer, I was asked to either purchase another “Service Tag” and “Express Service Code”, pay for on-call service, or purchase the CD somewhere else becuase they no longer carry the CD. My point is why the hell I should paid for something I should of received and already paid for? They are so awful that I compalint to the Better Business Beraue (BBB) that I deserve to have the right XP Professional CD that has the correct content that says XP Professional. One guy representatives I spoke with insist I was installing the CD wrong, I do not know what I was doing, and that he will put on his notes that I received the correct CD (basically, he is staing am ignorant and a liar). I informed him I am knowledgeable to what I am experiencing and talking about becuase my profession is in the Information Technology but he still insists that “I am at fault”. I was so humiliated, degraded, and disrespected!

DO NOT BUY DELL PRODUCTS- THEY WILL ONLY CARE FOR YOU IF YOU ARE PAYING FOR THEIR SERVICE. THEY WILL NOT HELP YOU IF YOU ARE NOT A PAYING CUSTOMER REGARDLESS IF IT IS THEIR FAULT THEIR PRODUCTS IS MALFUNCTIONING, THEY SENT YOU THE WRONG PRODUCTS/CDs, AND THEIR REPRESENTATIVES DO NOT HAVE A SYMPATHY!

Does anyone know how to directly contact Michael Dell. I can’t seem to get anybody to give out that info. I wonder why??

There may be a class action lawsuit in the works for Inspirons:

http://www.lieffcabraser.com/dell-inspiron-2.htm

I submitted my information regarding my problem with a short on the motherboard (happened twice) I encourage everyone else to visit the site and submit your problems with Inspirons.

We can hold Dell responsible.

Fellow sufferers: I, unfortunately, never even got to touch the notebook I tried to buy from Dell, but I did see the box in the hands of the ups man, when I refused the delivery, because the delberts at Dell tried to charge me the full ride rather than the advertised “enticement” price. I took the bait on an Inspiron b130 notebook, advertised at $499, regularly priced at $899, with all the features and old emailing, freecellplaying character like me needed. I made one mistake by “buying it over the phone.” Evidently, although it wasn’t indicated anywhere in the advertisement, or mentioned by the salesperson, only online buyers are entitled to the “savings” offered in the ad. So, I concluded the transaction, with plenty of “thank you very much for buying Dells” from my salesperson, and went fishing at a remote, non-wired location. Upon returning, I checked my emailed invoice, and doggone, they had rung me up for $899, plus tax, title and license. Kaabaam!…the emailing, chatting, spewing, spitting, hissing starts. The blood pressure goes through the roof. They tried to placate me with free printers, $50 coupons, 15% off teasers, but never did they offer to sell me, at the price I wanted, the machine that I had ordered. They said that, oh no, that price was for a lesser-equipped machine, which was nowhere to be found in the ad, which I was holding in my mitt. Get this, there were only three items in this ad, the notebook with the cofiguration I needed, a desktop, and a printer…how could you confuse this machine with a cheaper one?…I talked and chatted with the indian supports folks, and they are difficult to understand, and not any help at all, with their “this is all I can do for you” spiels. The only “satisfaction” I got, was after some terse exchanges by email with my original salesperson, he did shoot back that he “guessed he hadn’t done his job very well”, after I had him read the advertisement that led me to this circus in the first place. So, Toshiba, get ready for me….Ima, comin’ home with the cash…and if your gonna…., at least, kiss me first…

I ordered a set of Logitech headphones from Dell. Sound doesn’t come out one of the headphones.

Repeated emails to Dell Canada’s “Customer Care” results in absolutely no replies.

Live and learn I guess. Fortunately I just lost $39.

Michaels e-mail is Michael@dell.com also if you get a chance check out http://www.ihatedell.net the employees get shafted just like the customers – trust me I know, I was fired for sending myself an inappropriate e-mail – figure that one out – I’m still trying.

Well 9 months have passed, but it seems not much has changed.

I’m currently “engaging” with Dell (in the one-way manner customers usually must with Dell) regarding their hopelessly bungled upgrade to Windows Mobile v5 on the Axim X50/X50v series of PDAs.

This upgrade CD, charged at a nominal fee of about US$40, was announced nearly a year ago for release in Q3-2005. It eventually materialised in late-October05, and X50/X50v owners are STILL (May 4 2006) waiting for an update to fix a slew of major debilitating bugs in the initial release. Thier official line is “retrograde to PocketPC 2003SE, and we’ll let you know when a fixed Windows Mobile v5 ROM update is ready”.

How they could have released it at all is absolutely beyond comprehension – several of the bugs are obvious the first time you switch it on and use it for 15 minutes, not to mention waking up the next morning to a dead flat battery (theoretically switched off all night). Can the need to be first to market be so overwhelming as to somehow justify such glaringly irrational self-sabotage to their own company and its reputation? Has no one in Dell learned any lesson from history?

Coincidentally(?), they released the X51/X51v range in September 2005 which does in practise run WMv5 (bundled out-of-the-box) quite well!

If they’d had the guts to say “hey, we made a mistake, WMv5 just isn’t gonna run well on the X50/X50v range, so here’s your WMv5 Upgrade CD money back, or a healthy discount on an upgrade to the X51 range, an awful lot of people would have saved themselved an awful lot of time and frustration trying to get WMv5 working better on their Axim. Lord knows (but I wonder if Dell now does?) how many threw their hands up in the air and went elsewhere, but 2nd-hand X50/X50v prices on eBay would suggest lots! :-(

To the credit of mostly rank-amateur but highly loyal and dedicated (and seemingly time-rich) geeks in forums, they’ve found (or even WRITTEN THEIR OWN) fixes, hacks, patches and work-arounds for many of the problems that are truly Dell’s responsibility alone. No thanks at all to Dell, the X50/X50v now runs WMv5 barely adequately.

Judging from many Axim forum posts, Dell’s tech-support & customer service on this issue has been downright evasive and even deceptive.

The gobsmacking shocker here is that Dell are STILL offering for sale the WMv5 upgrade CD for the X50/X50v! Are they just collectively stupid (an inconceivable notion for any group of money-incentivated people, I know…), or have Dell marketing staff taken the damage-management staff out the back and shot them for the sake of a bit of extra revenue? More likely just avoiding admiting in any public way that this upgrade was a mistake… [slaps forehead in disbelief]

Oh yes, I have history too…

Late last year I purchased a few Dell 17″ LCD monitors. One of them had to be replaced THREE TIMES until a replacement arrived that lasted more than a couple of days. The person on the end of the phone at one of their sub-contracted spare parts warehouses said to me “you’re lucky, I know one woman who went through 7!”.

A couple of years ago, a Dell blade server at one of my client’s offices literally went up in smoke. An internal 5volt voltage regulator had been manufactured with a sub-standard coil, and suddenly after several months or operation it was delivering somewhat more than 5 volts (though not for very long!). Getting the components that had immediately failed to be replaced under warranty was quick and easy as expected.

But who wants a server (let alone a business-critical server) where half the (unreplaced) components (3 RAID hard drives, 1 of 2 CPUs, etc) have been exposed to a supply voltage that smoked the other half of the server? Any electronics engineer [turned IT geek - i wave] will tell you this is a recipe for instability at best and likely failure sooner or later.

What about the PS/2 KVM switcher and USB modem also plugged in that are powered from that same 5volt supply and were also dead at dawn? I had to fight tooth and nail for weeks to get it all replaced. Despite my client’s details clearly being on Dell’s records, and Dell claiming they contacted all known affected customers months before this failure happened, we were not contacted.

I’ve beaten my head against Dell’s customer service and tech-support circus for years, and been vocal with them in my dissatisfaction. I’m tired of calling Dell to place an order and forced to be put through to my assigned “business manager” (because the client is considered in their medium-range company size) only to be put through to their voicemail because they’re in-training/sick/on-holidays/out-to-lunch/whatever. WHO CARES which call-centre chook I speak to about basic sales questions and ordering?!?

And don’t get me started on overseas call centres filled with “obsequiously friendly” (thankyou Mr 2 Posts above, brilliant term!) but unintelligibly accented staff with absolutely no local knowledge (there ARE times where it helps, like when you’re trying to locate spare parts from several warehouses sprinkled across the country and having to ask your customer “is city-X [actually no-where] near city-Y?”) on often echoy, staticy, long-distance-time-lagged phone lines…

Until my two recent experiences, my opinion of Dell and advice to my clients has been “usually decent products, just hope you don’t need to deal with tech-support/customer-service.”

Your point is spot on, Jeff – if there is such loyalty out there despite the shabby treatment from Dell, imagine what they could do, and how customers might feel, if they were actually a bit human in their approach to us?

We live in hope, but for myself at least having very recently gained some sense of the scope of this problem (in other Dell products) and public sentiment (thanks to sites like yours), no longer in blind hope. There will always be vendors who will take this opportunity and offer better. Problem is , Dell are far from unique amongst the major IT vendors in thier dysfunctional approach to customers, PR & lowest-price-at-all-costs strategy. Maybe Dell could see this as an oppotunity – as Michael Dell himself, as spelled out in his own book as being so expert in exploiting – and rise above this morass – by listening…

cheers,
Anthony.

I purchased my Dell in Spring or Summer of 2004. Well some where during the first few months of 2005 I believe in Feb. or so, my computer would not boot

as you can see I am having trouble working on this laptop because I can not complete a simple blog about Dell: purchased my computer. I called the long distance number for what I thought was Dell Corporate to get an Operator who assured me that Customer Care could help me by taking a formal complaint, whom in turn transfered me to warranty repair who could not help me and had to transfer me to spare parts who could not help me because they were going to do me this grand favor of selling me a new harddrive at a discounted price, when I refused and asked to be transfered back to the Corporate Office and not the trouble shooting department, I was placed on hold for a few minutes the gentleman came back to the phone and said he will transfer me now. I asked where I was being transfered to and he said to the Corporate Office what a lie, I ended up back at the trouble shooting place in India! I hung up after being on that call for over 45 minutes. Another long distance call to the same number got another operator was transfered to Customer Care again and was able to file a formal complaint this time. That call took over 25 minutes. Someone called back a day later to acknowledge that they received my complaint and that they were offering a resolution to my problem they would send me a harddrive at no cost but I had to pay to have someone put it in. Well let’s see am i the stupid one? A harddrive is relatively inexpensive it’s the other stuff the technician does to get the unit working that is costly. This is why you won’t send a technician out to my home to fix the computer. Well that call took over 11minutes. Today I received a call from someone in customer care who offered me the same thing(to send me a new harddrive, but I have to hire someone at my expense to install it). I requested to speak with someone higher than her and was told that she was the highest at her level. I then requested to speak to Michael Dells Office and was told that I could not speak to them. She stated to me that she offered me a resolution and I refused it. Oh by the way I forgot to add that I think my father financed this wonderful computer for 24 months and he recently made his final payment so it ended up costing him more than the original $2400.00 because we built my computer with many extras. Let the truth be told I worked for Oreck Vacuum for many years in the Customer Service Department and we were to handle as many calls as we could without going to David Oreck himself but believe one thing if it escalated to his office I assure you he delt with it personally. Although he may not have the best product going on the market, his ability to make his feel like they are someone who supports his life style goes a long way and there fore even though they may have problems from time to time they remain loyal because of thepersonal touch even if his assistant types all the letters and makes the calls the customer feel like their complaint went some where. I know all of the top execs know each other, so therefore Mike I suggest that you give Mr. Oreck a call and get some pointers on how to keep loyal customers.

ThanK you for bringing clear concise publicity to what is evidently DELL’s pervasive and appauling customer-neglect under the guise of customer service.

I have mail-ordered ink cartridges from DELL many times. The last time however, they mistakenly sent the wrong model cartridges.

I am writing this having spent one hour and forty eight minutes, over four days, speaking to several people, mostly in the Phillipes and India. I finally called a “customer Service number” taken from my Dell printer manual, which turned out to be in Canada; the seemingly helpful and articulate young lady there named Rochada transferred my call to someone based in guess where….. The Phillipines, who then managed to cut me off after I had given only my name, they never called back. Obvioulsy the right approach would be for them to say: “I’m sorry for the mistake sir, we will pick-up the wrong cartrdges and ship the right one’s to you today” Is it too much to expect, after all, I paid them up-front two weeks ago and don’t have the cartridges I need and have paid for. Frankly, to sum up in the appropriate Venacular; DELL AFTER SALES SERVICE SUCKS!!

Perhaps I’ll just make the 60 mile round trip and trade these cartridges with Cartrideg World. It’s worth it to not have to ever deal with DELL again!!

I am appalled at the hideous service from dell, as a result I have missed three deadlines and have already been on the phone for an hour and have been disconnected during three transfers. You may wonder why so many transfers might occur when all I wanted was a replacement charger under warrantee. . . . looking for the part under warrantee, the charger which went dead, I called customer service. The woman from India had no idea what a charger might be and seemed absolutely unaware, untrained on how to handle my needs. After waiting five business days i received . . . (drum roll) . . . a portable surge protector. Yes. Three missed deadlines and missing material from my presentation tonight. I LOOK LESS PROFESSIONAL BECAUSE DELL COULD NOT DELIVER. To me this says it all.

I wish I had read this BEFORE I bought my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop. Have had the system for about 40 days and during that time have spent many hours on the phone with Dell Support trying to resolve problems. The absolute last straw was when the moron in India took me through a long process that made my system permenantly unusable (Stop code 7B). At this point they informed me that there was nothing further they could do for me and I would have to “Buy” expert technical help from Dell On Call to try to recover my system/data. I paid the $99 for “expert” assistance and am still left with no system and lost data.

I had believed that Dell was the reliable/dependable source for PCs I am no longer a believer. In fact I am not sure who to turn to now.

DELL ARROGANCE

I am seriously considering returning my Dell Laptop E1505 because of the customer service experience I just received. I also won’t bore you with my details, but I have never spoken to such mean, uncooperative, managers! This is the Dell Anadalusa Alabama Call Center and the manager’s name was ‘Alex’ and the senior supervisor’s name was Jeremey Badge #347123. When I told them what they were saying was contradicting what was on their website they said “I don’t care what the website says.” The senior supervisor had even nicer words: “I am as high as you can get” and “I’ll give you three options – no more, no less.”

Excuse me, I didn’t pay $1000 for this arrogance. Do NOT buy a Dell – Their product quality, BUT especially their customer service is TERRIBLE.

Well here it is………..I used to work for DELL. Did some great things in Austin to help the company but now run a technology service company in another state and do not understand why DELL has continued to go down hill with certain product lines. How can you have such great potential and really blow it?! (They laid off our group thats why.) Well my old boss (at DELL) who was much younger than me could only see email, buzz words, protocall and his stock. I really worked hard, did some great things and was glad when the layoffs hit back in 2000. I knew the layoffs were coming and looked forward to the big day of rest. It was great to be able to move from crazy Austin to beautiful Hot Springs Village and start my own company but I am starting to think the DELL VAR thing is not good for us. Yes we became a DELL VAR and after the last few months of E310 and E150 nightmares I think Michael needs to find design teams that can think and not sleep. You could find better systems being made by trade school nerds meeting at the local skate park than what we have installed lately for customers. Come on Michael, I left a good IT job at Baylor Medical in Houston to go to Austin (1998) and help bail out the data center mess in Austin so you could get numbers to Wall Street faster. (Oh I forgot…DELL used Compaq and Tandem back then to run things too.) Numbers got crunched faster, production was up and quality has dropped ever since on the low end products. If you cant make the low end stuff good then dont! Your wasting everbodys money…Oh I forgot not yours. Oh yea thanks for the award I got for great service….I just wish I could give you one back in return now but I cannot see that happening. Turn the quality around and quit trying to boost quantity for Wall Street. People are more important than numbers and people buy your products. Quit trying to please Wall Street and please the consumer and maybe you will be the first computer technology company besdies IBM to do the right thing.

Well here it is………..I used to work for DELL. Did some great things in Austin to help the company but now run a technology service company in another state and do not understand why DELL has continued to go down hill with certain product lines. How can you have such great potential and really blow it?! (They laid off our group thats why.) Well my old boss (at DELL) who was much younger than me could only see email, buzz words, protocall and his stock. I really worked hard, did some great things and was glad when the layoffs hit back in 2000. I knew the layoffs were coming and looked forward to the big day of rest. It was great to be able to move from crazy Austin to beautiful Hot Springs Village and start my own company but I am starting to think the DELL VAR thing is not good for us. Yes we became a DELL VAR and after the last few months of E310 and E150 nightmares I think Michael needs to find design teams that can think and not sleep. You could find better systems being made by trade school nerds meeting at the local skate park than what we have installed lately for customers. Come on Michael, I left a good IT job at Baylor Medical in Houston to go to Austin (1998) and help bail out the data center mess in Austin so you could get numbers to Wall Street faster. (Oh I forgot…DELL used Compaq and Tandem back then to run things too.) Numbers got crunched faster, production was up and quality has dropped ever since on the low end products. If you cant make the low end stuff good then dont! Your wasting everbodys money…Oh I forgot not yours. Oh yea thanks for the award I got for great service….I just wish I could give you one back in return now but I cannot see that happening. Turn the quality around and quit trying to boost quantity for Wall Street. People are more important than numbers and people buy your products. Quit trying to please Wall Street and please the consumer and maybe you will be the first computer technology company besdies IBM to do the right thing.

Dear Mr. Dell,

I have to admit I did not read this blog, but after 8 years of Dell promotion, Dell let me down as soon as I had my first guarantee issue.

Indeed a true Dell hell. Arrogant company.

No more Dell for me personally. No more Dell here at the office. And also I’ll never recommend Dell to others again, not to my friends, not to my family.

Dell has professionally killed my enthousiam for them and that’s something I won’t forget. Not ever and as long as I live.

Congrats Michael ! You’ve excellent people working for ya.

You know, my problem is not not with hardware or software crashing…things happen. My problem is when customer service does not follow through on what they promise to do. I own a relatively successful small business and have a couple Dell Inspiron 710 laptops. I had a problem with one of them that requires a replacement of the hard drive – ie my computer is down. On Thursday last week, I was told that a new hard drive with the original software image would absolutely be shipped to me that day for next day delivery on Friday. Great.

On Friday, however, the hard drive was not delivered. I called Friday night and was informed that the approval for the hard drive was just given and that it would ship on Saturday for Monday delivery. So, getting wise to this, I called on Saturday and was told that it indeed was going out for Monday delivery. So, here we are on Monday, and I called, and IT HADN’T SHIPPED AND won’t ship until Tuesday for Wed afternoon delivery!!! As mentioned, as a small business owner having 1 of my laptops down is catastrophic for me as they are all out in the field, and are essential to generate revenue.

In my 5 hours of conversation, I was not able to get to anyone who was empowered to do anything to minimize the effects of the situation. I was told that I would get a callback by an “escalation rep” several times and this hasn’t happened, and when I tried to call the corporate offices to talk to Ro Parra, the SVP of the Small Business Group, I was told by the operator that I could not talk to anyone outside the “Customer Service Chain of Command!”

We all have to deal with problems and issues, but you know, had someone told me on Thursday that I would not get my hard drive until the following Wed, I probably would have followed a very different course of action than I did – ie I probably would have reformatted the hard drive, loaded the program software manually and then restored all the other files, but given the answers that I got, I elected to trust Dell. In the meantime, I have lost much good faith with several customers along with some revenue, spent countless hours on the phone and still do not have resolution.

I find this whole situation enlightening of Dell being very arrogant and find it hard to believe that I cannot get in touch with anyone who actually cares about trying to help remedy my situation, and who is empowered to go beyond the script to do the right thing. I WILL NOT purchase any more Dells for my growing business and will strongly recommend other products to others.

All I want is competent people who will do their best to help my situation, give me accurate information, and be empowered to do the right thing. Its obvious that Dell does not fit these parameters.

Being the latest victim of Dell Computer, I want to share my story: I purchased a laptop Inspiron 1705, 100gb. What I got was an Inspiron 1705 with 62gb with 53gb available. Additionally, I have broadband with Verizon which requires the standard PC card for internet access. What I got was no internet access because Dell decided to change the size of the PC slot without notification. I am in the New Orleans area devestated by levee breaches after hurrican Katrina and we still do not have phone service, thus the need for broadband service.

I am exhausted from trying to explain my situation to the India technical support, they did not understand my problem and I did not understand the scrip the first technician was trying to read, nor did I understand her supervisor. The next step was an email to technical support online, after 5 days I still do not have a response. I am outside the 21 days they allow for return and feel like I have been ripped off. This system cost me $2200
a sum of money I cannot afford to thow at Dell to help their bottom line, especially as we go through the restoration of our home, however we sorely needed the computer.

Dell is up there at the top of list along with the Louisiana Core of Engineers.

WOW!! I knew Dell was getting worse, and I knew they were having problems, but I never expected a problem like the one I just encountered. I am a Dell VAR, and I move a moderate amount of product through to my clients. That is, until today. I simply can’t afford the time to continue to fix their problems and deal with their incompetence any longer. In June I bought a new D820 laptop for a client. This is not some cheap laptop, but a system that cost me over $2,000. Out of the box it did not work correctly. After contacting Dell Gold Support both by phone and through their on-line chat, they wanted to start sending me parts and have me fix the laptop. After spending many hours with the techs, and finally getting a supervisor, they agreed to send a replacement laptop. The new laptop was received and upon examination I found that it was configured incorrectly. After spending several more hours with Gold Tech Support, I was told to take parts from the old laptop and put them in the new one; specifically, the hard drive which I just finished programming for the client. I’ve invested over 20 hours just fixing Dell’s problems, and after calling Customer Care and again speaking with a supervisor, they offered to compensate me in the amount of $100 for over 20 hours of my time. Then they hung-up on me. I called again and got some guy in India, who wants to start the entire process over again. After providing the ticket number and asking for his supervisor, he says no problem, and he hangs-up. I have been in the IT business for over 20 years. I am a MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer), I’m certified on MS Exchange and everything from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows Server 2003, I have an excellent customer base that covers Long Island and Manhattan, and customer service is my primary focus. I have never, in 20 years, encountered a company as frustrating as Dell; a company that has a complete lack of respect for its clients, or a company that hires complete fools to interact with the public. Aside from being the president of my company I am also on the board of education and the chairperson for the technology committee for the 3rd largest non-city school district in New York. Dell can not be the only player on the block, and I will find the alternatives and find a way to work with them. I have been insulted by Dell; by their lack of respect, their lack of concern for my time, and by their lack of quality customer support, both technical and non-technical, and I can not in good conscience continue to do business with this type of company. If anyone reading this is aware of real, viable brand name alternatives to the Dell product line, I would appreciate an email. We sell all types of systems; laptops, workstations, desktops, servers, and storage units (NAS), and I would welcome any information and direction that you can provide. Please send any guidance directly to me at info@Am-Pro-Services.com. Thank you very much for your help.

Dear Mr. Jarvis,

It is said to me, that you think a corporate professional like Mike Dell would give a rats shit about your gay displessure with his company. Stop bitching and find something to do.

There are a lot of stories about bad service – and in fact, statistically, people who have bad customer experiences are likely to tell 22 people about it, where people with good experiences tell roughly 3 people.

Every year that PC Magazine has done customer satisfaction surveys, Apple and IBM are on the top, whereas Dell is way towards the bottom. I’ve had nothing but good customer service from Apple, and at work HP. Sun service (admittedly not a PC manufacturer) has aways been listed as good, as has Cisco (again, not a PC manufacturer).

If you want an interesting read, read Tom Peters on customer service. More power to the customer! It’s the customer who’s most important, not “increasing shareholder value.”

Also – making the customer happy is a *lot* easier if you make the *employees* happy. A grumpy, part-time, no benefits, minimum wage customer service person who doesn’t make enough to feed her family isn’t good for business.

ZODDIAC WORLD LTD

Email;zodiac_worldlt@yahoo.com

XBOX 360 $200USD

PS3 $180UD

Sony VAIO A140 – Pentium M 1.5 GHz – 15.4″ TFT
Specs: Intel Pentium M (1.5 GHz), 512 MB DDR SDRAM, 7.3 lbs, 15.4 in TFT active matrix, Microsoft Windows XP Professional for $450usd

Sony VAIO A230B – Pentium M 725 1.6 GHz – 15″ TFT
Specs: Intel Pentium M (1.6 GHz), 256 MB DDR SDRAM, 7.1 lbs, 15 in TFT active matrix, Microsoft Windows XP Professional for $540usd.

Sony VAIO A230B – Pentium M 715 1.5 GHz – 15″ TFT
Specs: Intel Pentium M (1.5 GHz), 256 MB DDR SDRAM, 7.1 lbs 15 in TFT active matrix, Microsoft Windows XP Professional for $460usd.

Sharp Actius MC24 (PCMC24) PC Notebook
AMD Athlon XP-M 1.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, 12.1 in. XGA TFT LCD, CD-RW/DVD-ROM, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, 5.0, for 400usd.

Sharp Actius MM20P (PC-MM20P) PC Notebook
Transmeta Efficeon TM8600 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, 10.4 in. XGA TFT LCD, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, 2 lb., 1 x. for $600usd.

Toshiba Satellite M55-S329 (PSM50U05X01V) PC Notebook
Intel Pentium M 1.86 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 100 GB hard drive, 14 in. WXGA TFT Active Matrix, Dual Layer DVD±RW, Microsoft Windows XP H for $560usd.

Toshiba Satellite M55-S139 (PSM53U00K008) PC Notebook
Intel Celeron M 1.6 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive, 14 in. WXGA TFT Active Matrix, Dual Layer DVD±RW, Microsoft Windows XP Home for $450usd.

Toshiba Satellite M55-S325 (PSM50U01Z00W) PC Notebook
Intel Pentium M 1.73 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 100 GB hard drive, 14 in. WXGA TFT Active Matrix, DVD±RW, Microsoft Windows XP Professional for $460usd.

Panasonic Toughbook 51 (CF51JFDDCBM) PC Notebook
Intel Pentium M 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB hard drive, 15 in. TFT Active Matrix LCD, CD-RW/DVD-ROM, Microsoft Windows XP Professional for $700usd.

Panasonic Toughbook CF-73 (CF73XCVTSBM) PC Notebook
Intel Pentium M 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive, 13.3 in. XGA TFT LCD, CD-RW/DVD-ROM, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, for $750usd.

TELEVISION Panasonic TH-42PD50U Television…..$500USD Panasonic TH-42PX50U Television…..$900USD Panasonic TH-50PX50U Television…..$1000USD Panasonic TH-42PWD6UY Television….$400USD Panasonic TH-42PD25U/P Television…$300USD Panasonic TH-42PHD8UK Television….$400USD Panasonic TH-65PHD7UY Television….$2000USD Pioneer PDP-5050HD Television…….$900USD Panasonic TH-37PX50U Television….$400USD Panasonic TH-42PX500U Television…$700USD Sony KLV-32M1 Television………$300USD Sony PFM-42V1/S Television………$400USD Sony KDE-61XBR950 Television……$3000USD Sony KDE-42XBR950 Television……$900USD Sony PFM-42X1/S Television…….$400USD Sony KDE-42XS955 Television……$450USD Sony FWD-50PX1/S Television…..$1000USD Samsung HP-R4252 Television……..$410USD Samsung LN-R328W – LCD TV – 32….$400usd Samsung LN-R408D – LCD TV – 40….$700usd Samsung LT-P326W – LCD TV – 32….$550usd Samsung LTM 225W – LCD TV – 22….$400usd Samsung PPM63H3-plasma panel 63…$1000usd Samsung HP-P5071 50-inch 1366X768 HD Plasma TV Ref…..$600usd Samsung HPP5031 – plasma panel – 50…$800usd Pioneer PDP-5050HD Television…….$800USD Sharp 32″ Aquos HD-Ready LCD TV….$400usd. and many more…………… LAPTOPS Dell Latitude C640 1.8GHz P4 Laptop w/CD-RW……$350USD Dell Inspiron XPS M140 Notebook Computer for Home…..$480USD Sony VAIO FS540P – Pentium M 730 1.6 GHz – 15.4″ TFT…$460USD Sony Intel Pentium M 100GB Notebook Computer with DVD+/-R/RW Drive…$450USD ThinkPad G40 2389 – C 2.5 GHz – 14.1″ TFT IBM…..$420USD Panasonic Toughbook 18 Touchscre……$400USD HP Compaq Business Notebook nc8230 – Pentium M 760 2 GHz – 15.4″ TFT…$800USD HP Compaq Mobile Workstation nw8240 – Pentium M 760 2 GHz – 15.4″ TFT…$650USD and many more………….. OFFICE EQUIPMENT PLV-80 16:9 Widescreen WXGA Home Theater Multimedia Projector….$7,000usd magicolor 2430DL Color Laser Printer (20 PPM, 2400×600 DPI, Color, 32MB, PC/Mac)…$140usd Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV – film scanner (35 mm)…..$100usd EP7120 DLP Projector (1024×768, 1600:1)……$300usd Optoma H 31 – DLP projector……$300usd 110” Velvet Wrapped Luxurious Sensation Series DT1100 HDTV Fixed Projection Screen…$300usd PowerLite Home 10+ Ultra-Portable Multimedia Projector…..$400usd ScreenPlay 4805 Projector by InFocus………$450usd Panasonic PT LB30NT – LCD projector……..$700usd PIXMA MP950 PHOTO MLTFUNC AIO 22/29PPM P/C/S…….$140usd Elite Screens VMAX120UWH 121in 16:9 Electric Projector…..$140usd Da-Lite Cinema Contour 144 x 192-in Pearlescent…….$400usd MP610 DLP Projector (800×600, 2000 Lumens, 2000:1)…..$250usd. And many more of your choice …

WE MAKE SHIPPMENT THROUGH FEDEX EXPRESS AND ITS WITHIN 48 HOURS,

THANKS,

REGARDS,

MANGEMENT.

Dell 5160 1.1 yr harddrive crashes, 1.5 yr the power doesn’t charge anymore.. Dell sucks!! I am not buying Dell again

I am going to get you.

You know.

Batley.

I have a DELL Demension 8200 and get a “Previous Fan failure” Alert on boot up.

DELL’s website says check the “fans”. Computer F2 says it is CPUO Fan Failure.

What do I do.

Thanks.

Every computer will have a mechanical failure eventually. Hard drives spin at thousands of RPMs, and like the too-rapidly beating hearts of hummingbirds, they just burn themselves out. No one likes it when a computer component fails, but it’s crucial to our assesment of the quality of a computer company that we don’t give too much weight to isolated stories of failed components. The real measure is in HOW THE COMPANY HANDLES THE ISSUE. My Apple Powerbook hard drive died after two years of service. Sooner than I would have liked, but whatever; I keep a back-up (like all of you do, right?). Apple promptly replaced the drive as promised in their extended warranty agreement. My brother in law had a Dell notebook computer whose drive failed (also within two years). His computer came back from repair with NO drive installed at all. It took Dell weeks to finally determine that his old drive was hopelessly lost and to replace it with a new one.

This has been my experience. Apple provided great service. Dell screwed up. But, as I said, don’t just believe individual anecdotal evidence. Apple has been number one in customer satisfaction year after year. Dell has been getting worse and worse:

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,103959,00.html

yaa .. dell is SUCKS !!

i have death inspiron 5150 on ma room … n want to put it on garbage

good bye dell

Marvelous article! If you want to really hear some Dell Hell stories, just walk across any college university. I’m pretty sure there are PLENTY of students that will share in on stories of how their laptop’s hard-drives crashed within a year, displays stopped working within a year, and other misc. problems.

I bought a NEW E1705.
There is supposed to be 3 LEDS (Power, Hard Drive and Battery) on the little circuit board under the rt hinge cover as part of the palm rest.
I have been trying to explain to your monekys for 3 weeks. I’m DONE.
There is a plastic bump instead of the middle hard drive LED. FACTORY DEFECT.

I have worked in the IT field from almost 20 years. I am compaq certified and have done warranty repair work for compaq.

THIS IS REDICULOUS to put your customers thorugh this kind of BS. I have wasted hours on e-mails and phone calls just to get the machine fixed. and it’s bran NEW.

I bought 2 laptops fully loaded ajnd 24″ display. I am VERY UNHAPPY in how this is being handled, not only by your monkeys in India but also by your warranty provider Bantech. He even spent an hour on the phone trying to explain to India what the problem is.

they suck at customer service

plus I bet when you’re brakes need replacing rather than take your car to a mechanic you bitch and whine about how rubbish gm or ford or whoever are!?

To me I believe it may have something to do with the users not having enough knowledge about computers and since they can’t tell the diffrence between software or hardware issues then it can be pretty frustating on both sides.

Besides the above I believe for sure that Dell is hiring some guys that do not know anything about troubleshooting and they are just like the users they are talking to.

Ezetarget

Well if any wants to sell there e1505 DUO CORE,lET ME KNOW,iAM A CERTIFED TECH FOR DELL,MY EMAIL IS AS FOLLOWS,p.s I CAN TEACH DELL HOW TO MAKE A BETTER COMPUTER,I HAVE OVER 32 YEARS OF COMPUTERS….

M_ODELL53@HOTMAIL.COM

THANK YOU MICHAEL ODELL

I have always heard the Dell horror stories and never experienced any problems after purchasing 5 computers in the last 2 years.

Until September 1st , 2006.

I purchased a Canon PowerShot and within a week they lowered the price from $499 to $339.

I called and requested either a price match or a return authorization.

Well, it’s clear to me that Dell has incented their agents never to give a credit. And worse their India based agents follow these incentives to the letter.

Don’t want to bore anyone with the discussions – total waste of someone bandwidth and storage.

Net-net is I wasted several hours being told that the credit was applied, confirming the credit in process only to find out today that they can’t, so I got an RMA and purchased the same product from Amazon.

Dell has lost my personal business, my companies business, my friends business and anyone with ear shot.

Nice job Dell!! You get an A.

If I was Michael I’d change my last name to get as far away from this company as possible.

This is a little thing I sent in today. I was feeling pretty proud of myself. Until I read all of the above. I am not feeling so positive about a successful solution now.

My HP laptop has always treated me right. Guess it is time to sail another boat.

To all Concerned:

I started trying to order a computer on 9/7. I was on the Dell web site ordering the machine I wanted. As I went through the process I ended up on the business side building my machine. I put together what I wanted and tried to complete my order.
My Dell preferred account would not work. I called and was told “I was on the business side and had to have a business account.” It was getting late so, knowing it would be an arduous process I decided to set up the Dell Business account the following day. I called, repeated my dilemma, and proceeded to create a business account. For some reason they could not approve the business account right away, so I had to assist in filling out some different papers. So we went through this process. The agent got my number and said he was off at 4:00pm and it make take awhile since it was Friday, but if I did not hear from him today he would get back with me next week.

I waited a week and called back 9/14. Was told by Erik ( Eric Myers x 7958428) the approval did not come through but that he could help me. So I processed my order with Eric. At the end of the process Eric said he would need a credit card, I said sure. I was not paying close attention or I would have noticed the order was $100 more expensive than when I had originally set up the system. After reviewing the order I thought maybe some special had passed and that was why the order was $100 more. So the next morning I called and cancelled my order.

I then got on the Dell On line site, and started looking for a different laptop (of course this time I chose the Home side to avoid any problems) Found a machine I wanted, used the Dell Preferred Account, completed the transaction, feeling satisfied that the goal of getting a machine was completed. On 9/15 I received an e-mail notification that my order had been Acknowledged and a additional e-mail notification that my order had been Confirmed. I must say I was feeling pretty good then. These e-mails validated to me that the process had worked. I was especially happy when I received a e-mail notification that my machine had shipped. Imagine my disappointment after opening the box and realizing it was the Laptop I had cancelled.

I immediately called the dell 800 number. I was asked for all my information so the next person would have it and be able to better assist me. So I gave all my important information to the Rep and explained the whole story. I was then transferred to returns. It was after business hours so there was no one to answer my call. Or so the message explained to me. Having faith I assumed/hoped that the Rep had transferred me to the wrong number. I called back, went through the entire process again, but this time I told the Rep, “last time they transferred me It was after business hours and there was no one available to assist me. She assured me there would be someone to help me at the number she transferred me to. Alas it was not to be. Same Recorded Message. I called back, before I went through the process told the Rep what had happened and was told they were probably closed and I should try back tomorrow. I thanked her and decided to do that.

The next morning (9/20) I started off fresh and sure that I could resolve the confusion of the previous weeks. On the first call I went through the normal process. I was getting rather good at it by then. The Rep thanked me and transferred me to the next minion. This one went through the same process. This confused me as the previous Rep had told me I was giving her all this information so it would facilitate me through the process. Apparently this was not the case. as I had been transferred to the Home side and would need to deal with the Business side to set up the Return arrangements. Again I had to go through the entire process. At this point the Rep said she would have to contact them (the mysterious “them”) and find out what she could do for me on the return. I waited on hold as she attempted to contact “them”. When she came back she said they were still busy, and would keep trying, I said “PLEASE.” The next time she came back with the best news I could have hoped for “She had someone on the other line that could help me.” After going through the normal exit spiel she connected me to Elizabeth (Elizabeth Agent ID# 0146183). Of course I went through the whole process again. Elizabeth said she could take care of my problem. She explained how the process would work and I was issued a RMA #.

After finishing I asked Elizabeth to have someone contact concerning my disappointment with the whole process. She said Nicole (?) would call me back, but also mentioned Julies name.

Today is Friday 9/22 still no contact. (besides a form)

I was approved for a preferred account for $5000 why Home purchase and not for business purchases? Both are tethered to the same customer number!!!

I have been a Dell Customer/Advocate since 2001.
I have purchased 4 Desk Tops 4 Laptops, Printer, Camera, and not really sure what else.

Although none of these purchases in themselves add up to much, I would expect over the life course of my lifetime my purchase could become a decent amount.

I am a very busy man. I would estimate my investment in this single purchase at 8 to 10 hours. When I look at my income, this is at the very least a $300 investment of my time.
I tell you this in hopes it will help increase the value of this letter, because I invested the time to write it.

I want to continue to do business with you, but if you continue to make me invest so much of my time for purchases it becomes more cost effective for me to walk into Best Buy for my next machine.

Ponce Gomez

P.S.
On a side note, the second machine I ordered has not been delivered because the address is missing the apartment number. Even though the last machine went to the same apartment and it is in my account profile.

Good Article Jeff! Even i m thinking to switch to some other brand like Apple as the services r not better of Dell.

I have been in Dell Hell. I have 2 Dells, a desktop and a laptop. I will never buy another. The customer service is horrendous. I don’t even want to go into it. My next computer will probably be an Apple and I will celebrate the day my Dells are out of my house.

I love my Dell and the service has been great, but I must agree with the that trying to talk to someone who speaks understandable English is almost impossible. I know the agents trying to assist are trying and probably very knowledgeable, but I just cannot understand most of them; this becomes very frustrating and time consuming. I really do hate to complain and it is not the agents fault, but I do believe Dell should hire personel that the customer can understand. I do know that the next time I purchase a computer I will check to see what type of customer support is available. Thank you.

Well I did not see your blog till today, It came up in a search for a potential fault on a dell power. I can’t blame Dell as it is on a Dell server I got on ebay and it actually works, it just makes this clicking noise when the server is off.

I have been using Dell for many years, last week I finally turned off a server that has been running for 7 years 24/7. I had one fault during that time which was a SCSI terminator became loose.

I have racks full of servers and thousands of workstations, I don’t even take the 4 hour service on the racks as our systems are so reliable.

Dell do make gaming systems called XPS or something, I have never used them but a neighbour had one and it certainly had some grunt.

I applaud you for trying to raise your concerns to the boss and hope that in some way your blog has helped improve service at Dell.

I placed an order with Dell last Wednesday. Credit card purchase was approved but for some reason I never got the confirmation that the computer shipped. (It’s for a friend in another state.) I called Dell on Friday night. It seems they were confused about the difference between the billing and mailing addresses, something that most online sales sites, and my credit card, handle with ease. The long night of chatroom-format customer “service” and telephone calls to a series of live albeit uninformed people ended with success: Order approved, shipment confirmed….or so I thought.

I just checked the order status online today. It reported that the orders were cancelled. Again the calls, the online chat, and all confirmed: I was back at square one. Then I stepped back and realized: Why was I fighting so darn hard to buy a computer from a company that offered such crappy service when it should be TRYING to SELL to me?

Heck, after reading this blog, it seems I was lucky.

Mr. Dell and Co. – Thanks for working so hard to encourage me to buy from your competitors!

Jim Arnold

Check your bills with Dell as well. I pay monthly through their financial services. I made the mistake of paying my bill on the 2nd of the month. The statement goes out the 4th of the month. I was charged a $30 late fee for non payment. I called to complain and it was suggested to me that I read my contract. I did….THREE times. No where does it say that you would be punished for paying your bill in a timely fashion. FYI Dell refused to take off late charge and now it is on my credit report as a late payment…Buyer Beware

Long time Dell customer until now. Latest laptop order on December 8th was a DISASTER. Customer Service apologetic but only advise was to place a new order.

Yeah – I am placing a new order with APPLE Computers. Dell not worth time and frustration.

PLEASE READ

I just finished filing a complaint to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and I urge everyone to join me who has been burned by Dell customer service. I have been tricked out of $230.00 this month by Indian representatives (this is a fact, I am not racist) who sent me on phone odysseys while “on hold” or “being transferred.” In addition, one woman gave me a number to call if I should get disconnected… Guess what, I did… And it was a number to order X-rated materials! There is truly no accountability to the Dell management among outsourced customer service representatives. This is OUTRAGEOUS and they will only hang themselves. I suggest Microsoft complain publicly because a great software company is losing business because of a bad hardware provider. What a sad, sad story.

When I purchased my Dell notebook back in 2006 for $2,200, I was informed by a Dell represenative that all my parts were covered in my 4 yr. warranty. My battery died and I called Dell for a replacement, and I am now being informed that my battery only has a 1 yr. warranty. I have been disputing this with Dell for well over 1 month now, after reaching the supposed head Supervisor, he offered me $10 off of a $165 battery, what a joke. No one from Dell will provide me with the Headquarters address or CEO name. This has taken over my life, and has caused me so much stress, I now want to return my notebook for a FULL refund, and have nothing to do with Dell ever again. No one will help me from customer service, can you please provide me with a name and address where I can write a complaint letter to. I would appreciate any help that you can give me.

A Very Unsatisfied Dell Customer,
Jodi Zabawski

First, this is just a start. I plan to post this on every message board I can find in the next couple days. I’d like to prevent people from going through the hell I have experienced the last couple months. I hope they return my money when I try to send the Dell I have back in, because I wash my hands of them.

It took from the 13th of December to the 6th of January to get my Dell Studio 1537 laptop. That’s a hell of a long time to live without a computer, and surely, if a new customer wants a computer, you would THINK they would get it to them faster. In any case, the customer service guy lied to me about a number of things (including the time it would take to arrive) in order to get me to buy the computer. Then, I was told I could cancel, but that left me without a reliable computer to use and no way to purchase a new one (I used Dell credit to get the laptop). So I suffered the long wait, and it finally arrived.

Upon receiving my new laptop, I decided to watch a movie on it. I put the DVD in, it loaded, but the DVD skipped over and over. Once that happened, I attempted to eject the DVD, but it wouldn’t come out. So I restarted the computer and finally got it out of the drive. After this, I decided to try a different DVD, since the first one had a minor scratch on the surface. I tried a new DVD this time, but the DVD drive decided to pop the DVD out this time. The drive also sounds like it’s a huge machine trying to produce a lot more than a video on the screen of a laptop. Something is wrong with it. Almost inevitably, the drive pops out any DVD at some point while I watch a movie.

What did I do? I called the technical support, and spent hours (two seperate times), attempting to get the issue resolved to no avail. It seemed clear that the issue was hardware, not software. Unfortunately, because I had to wait so long to get the computer, and because I was sooooo behind on work for school and my campus job, I was desperate. I wanted to return the computer. I spoke with the special department at Dell that talks to people like me; those people who are unhappy with their purchase and remorseful that they even contacted the company to begin with. The man told me that the issue was stated to be resolved by the tech department (the people in India that I spoke with I told I would have to play a DVD to figure out if the computer was actually functioning properly or not, and that I could not tell them that the issue was resolved, but they put it in the computer that it was). Because it said this, he told me that I would have to pay 15% of the computer’s total cost to return it. I flipped out. After about 10 minutes of listening to me screaming, he said that he would see what he could do. But, would I be interested in taking $75 and keeping the computer? Haha! NO! I don’t want a broken computer! So then he offered to send me a NEW computer. He essentially begged me to take it, promising the new one would be built in 5-7 days and immediately sent out. He assured me that it would work perfectly as well. I didn’t really want to, but once again, I don’t have the money to buy a computer and Dell gave me credit- I figured I’d give it a shot and told the man I would return the computer at no charge if I did not receive what I ordered.