Don't Buy A DELL ... Worst Quality of the 25 computers I have owned !!!

Whatever you do, DON'T BUY A DELL !!! I have owned at least 25 computers over the last 10 years. I have a business and 4 kids. 15 years ago, Dell was making quality computers. Over the last 5 years, my wife works for a company who issues Dell Laptops to employees. All of the consultants have to have their computers worked on constantly. Hard Drive crashes are common along with other nusiance issues. They are also flimsy. My daughter goes to a school which requires and issues laptops to students. They have been issuing Dell Laptops for several years now. In the last 16 months that my daughter has had her Dell Laptop, she has had the hard drive replaced 6 times. YES 6 hard drives have crashed, and this is typical of all of the students in the school !!! It is a joke among the students. Many of them need to have their own laptop that is not a Dell that they keep to use when the school issued Dell's are being repaired. They use their own more than the school issued ones. There are currently 8 active laptops in my house (well actually 6 active and the 2 Dells that my wife and daughter had issued, its hard to refer to them as active since they spend a lot of time with IT repair people). But overall, none of the other computers ever need repair, and of the 25 or so that I have owned in the last 10 years, I have had one hard drive go. I have had one power supply go. I have had one mother board go (a Dell from around 97 that was better quality than today). I have had a few other nuisance problems that were not emergency problems that needed immediater repair i.e. floppy drive broken, latch broke, hinge broke, component that drove the brightness of the video screen broke. But these were many different brands and the computers were several years old. My wife's and daughter's were barely a month or two old when problems started and thereafter continued. And this is true of their collegues.

If you buy a Dell you are buying problems. You will need to buy an extended warrranty, a external harddrive to back you data up on a daily basis or if it is important back it up as you create it, and you will need a second computer for when your Dell is out at repair.

I am currently organizing the parents at my daughter's school, and then I will find out what other schools this Dell distributor sells to and I would like to organize those parents, and then if they do not return 100% of our money, it will be affordable for us as a large group to hire an attorney and sue Dell and their distributor for our money. We also should be addressing the frustration of the students and the loss of data that many of them have suffered, and the parents frustration.

I am writing here today becasue my daughter's hard drive just crashed for the 6th time yesterday. So I am loaded and ready to go to battle. I am going to as many sites as I can to alert the public as to the bad, bad quality that Dell produces. I hope that as a result of my efforts, I hit the company at a time of weakness, since the economy is weak, and I hope it results in the failure of the company. I plan on spending a lot of my time to make this happen. It is that serious that I feel as though I am doing a public service to help people not waste their hard earned money buying such an inferior quality piece of junk.

I am not recommending any other brands to anyone because I do not want to in anyway compromise my efforts. So do your research of the other brands and choose one of them. I own at least three other brands with which I have not had any trouble.

 

The numerous hard drive crashes you mention are probably not fully Dell´s fault. Dell is a system integrator not a hard drive manufacturer.

Were all the drives the same make or different?

 

To make things clear, please answer the following questions:

- Where did this take place? US? Europe? Elsewhere? Customer support and build quality varies greatly within a brand from place to place. For example, Dell Europe assembles laptops in Ireland, while Dell US assembles them somewhere in the US I think.
- Which laptop model was the school distributing? Dell, just like other major brands (HP, Lenovo, Fujitsu), has "consumer" models which are usually cheap and not that well build, as well as "business" models which are usually pricier and well build. This "cheapness" happens with all brands.

 

US sold units are assembled in Malaysia, thats why EU built Dell´s tend to have higher quality.

 

Maybe it's time to look for WHY these hard drives are crashing? There might even be a fix for it...i know a lot of issues get addressed through updates so, maybe that would be worth a try? Just saying this 'cause you don't say anything about what you did to determine the problem.
How did a HDD crash 6 times since yesterday anyway? You mean you got BSOD's? If all those laptops the students are using are the same and have the same issue there might be a very good fix for it

 

Six HDD failures is too many and I wonder what is the true cause. Either there is a power problem with the computer which is damaging the drive electronics or the computer is being moved when the HDD is running. One impact is enough for the heads to collide with the discs. HDDs with free-fall sensors are now available to address this risk.

You do not indicate which models of Dell computers are incurring the problems. Latitudes are better built than Inspirons because they assume that corporate computers, which the user has not paid for out of their own pocket, incur rougher treatment and less tender loving care. Vostros are somewhere in between.

My E6400 is the first Dell I have bought for some years and the build quality, although not perfect, has impressed me.

John

 

I don't think it's actually the HDD dying on you is it? Otherwise you've been very lucky to happen to have 6 spare ones lying around that we're all fit for the laptop

 

I agree. I have the very same model and also like its build quality a lot.

 

Yawn. Laptops are complicated. Good IT people select and support them wisely... Dell caters well to this need if you know how to execute it. Generally speaking, Dell does not make hard drives. Hard drives are very reliable unless you toss them around a lot. Treat your data with great care. I don't see a problem here.

And pay for quality or else you won't be able to find it any more. Exactly which Dell notebooks are you complaining about... this forum should know their quality well?

GK

 

Maybe instead of spending time/effort to "help people" you might consider helping yourself... some computer/tech classes,learn about the products you are trying to utilize,instead of blatent bashing on forums like this

 

Flame and run? This guy doesn't stick around to respond to any questions about his allegations. Maybe he works for HP
BTW, maybe the laptops are Inspirons and these kids are, well maybe hard on them?

 

Have owned 5 dell laptops in the past 4 years -- not a single hard drive crash -- and I travel daily with them.

If you've had that many problems - i'd venture to guess that it is how you are treating them - not the build quality.

Yes - there are lemons amongst all brands - it happens --

I've had nothing but superb customer service and solid build quality.

Remember -- DELL does NOT build hard drives - they assemble and market laptops. They really are a marketing company - not a computer manufacturer.

Given the number of machines they build and sell -- there are bound to be some lemons. I'm sure that not every machine in your daughter's school has problems - you probably don't ever hear about the ones that don't break - and I'd venture to guess that many of the issues are because of the way the kids abuse them.

 

Thats funny because i work as a repair tech for a large dell house. Roughly supporting 6000 dell desktops and 5500 laptops. I think they are very reliable.

The hard drive "dieing" issue is likely a poor job with the image that the school created for the students.

 

Psh. no way. We have laptops that K-5th graders are still using that work great and they were bought in 2000-01. We got some toshibas that lasted 2 years before they were totally trashed. Toshibas were replaced 3 years ago with dells. The original dell laptops are still running great with their 8gb hard drives and so are the new ones! These were all used by kids who are rough on them.

 

My European E6400 was assembled in Poland. I believe this a new factory Dell has setup in Europe in addition to the old factory on Ireland.

Anyway, my E6400 came with one memory module not properly inserted and one of the connectors to the wireless LAN card not properly inserted. It was shipped very fast but I would happily have waited one more day to getter better build quality.

Örjan

 

I hope the originating poster comes back to read the followup posts and/or make replies to some of the q's.


Cin

 

i have a project to manage in the up coming months with a roll out of about 900 e6500's. When they come in mass numbers like that its really easy to get a good idea about build quality rather than just getting one. Our few test units were pretty great though.

 

Ah cool. The 3 Dells sitting on my desk at the moment have been the 3 most reliable out of the past 15 computers I have owned.

 

I have owned several Dells laptops and one server and I work with a lot of companies that have Dell equipments and my experience and the ones of my clients are very good, they are very reliable and the support is excellent.
I even had the consumer ones for my and my family and they are in great shape, now we have consumer fro family and business line for my company and they are very good.
I would never think of changing brands again.

 

I for one would really like to hear some more details indeed....or is this just a case of letting out some steam, and not interested in a solution. If it's something with the laptops in question people here could probably be of help, again, if you're interested in that at all

 

While I respect this guy's opinion, realize that he will probably not be looking at the forum to see our responses... He just wanted to vent, and as he indicated, he is going to vent in as many places as he possibly can.

I'm guessing that he won't ever be back to look at the results of his thread.

 

Whats the point of writing all that and not coming back. Its like you ran into best buy complained for 20 minutes to the customer care people and ran out before they could say anything to you.

 

Exactly. I was hoping to hear more from the orginating Poster...like what lappy models, he had that were causing the prob's etc.

Who knows...maybe there will be an appearance!

 

That's where my money is. That or the kids at that school are all passing around the same .torrent-fed virus, which could easily have made its way onto the wife's machine as well.

Six hard drive crashes in such a short time? Are you sure you mean "crash", or maybe just lockup/blue screen? Six actual crashes would almost assuredly mean it is not a hardware problem. More likely a device driver or other shoddy/malicious program being run, which takes us back to the image the school is using.