I've had a few occasions to deal with Dell over the past
year or so. With the exception of _one_ experience, all of them
have been bad.
The first was with a new laptop. Display failed on the second
day; the on site "technical support" guy turned out to be the
guy who ran the local hole-in-the-wall computer shop. He
arrived, I handed him the machine and he said "I've never seen
one of these before". After tightening all of the screws on the
case (he was unable to figure out how to get into it) he handed
it back to me and said "send it back to Dell". Three weeks and
innumerable calls later, I finally told them I was going to
ask my credit card issuer for a chargeback -- and the next day
a new machine appeared. The hard drive on _that_ failed after
72 hours; it took another two weeks to get a replacement. It's
been stable since, but by the time it was all over it took more
than two months to get it to that state.
The second was with a batch of 1U rack mount servers for a
Wall Street client. The front of each machine was divided
into four bays, the first three having hot swap drives, the
fourth having indicators and switches. One of these arrived
with the switch panel shoved so far back into the chassis that
it actually popped over the retaining ears that were supposed
to make such a thing impossible (the shipping boxes were undamaged
and the machines packed like nitro, so this was a manufacturing
defect, not a shipping issue). The on-site service tech
arrives (a different tech -- these machines were installed
in an urban setting) and says "I've never seen one of these
before". Apparently that phrase is standard for all Dell
field service techs. She proceeds to sit cross-legged on
the machine room floor with the machine in her lap while
she talks on the phone to Dell for two hours. Eventually
she pries the panel out -- and breaks its retaining latch
in the process. Turns out that's not a FRU, so we have to
exchange the entire machine.
Once we get the machine sorted out, we go to rack mount them.
Dell, of course, sells rack mount kits, but they only work
with Dell racks. Dell sends "adapter" kits, but they only
work with two-post racks -- and we're using four post,
fully enclosed bays. The customer, who was looking at
buying a few thousand Dell machines, eventually drags
some senior Dell VP into their offices, and after I recount
our experiences with their machines in a conference call
(resulting, according to the customer, in the guy gagging
on his pizza) he manages to get the right kits beamed down
the following day.
I dunno. I no longer buy Dell, and more and more of our
customers are giving up on Dell as well. The build
quality is highly uneven and their tech support is biased
towards helping people plug their machines in. It's
incredibly frustrating to have people ask if you've
recently installed any new programs when your hard drive
is throwing nonrecoverable errors and starting to screech.
--
Chris Kennedy
chris_at_mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
Received on Thu Jan 10 2002 - 14:26:21 GMT