Read this before buying from Dell EPP/MPP

Long story short, I ordered two L702x's from the Employee Purchase Plan / Member Purchase Plan web site after extensive research here, with Dell chat, and with the technical service manual. Turned out the computers weren't right (didn't have four memory slots) because Dell chat didn't know what they were talking about as usual (I found this out after the usual excruciating multi-hour telephone exchange with Dell Customer Service and Technical support).

The good news is I ran across Denney (Dell sales), who is in Dell-Texas, not some out-sourced customer non-service company somewhere. The long story short on that one is that he fixed all the problems I had pleasantly and quickly, and supported me all the way through. If only I had ordered by calling him instead of ordering from the web site I could have saved myself ten hours of frustration and two weeks of time.

My recommendation: If you are going to order a Dell from the EPP/MPP site, don't! Contact this guy instead and save yourself a lot of trouble! I sure wish I had!

 

Glad you got your issue resolved. My past purchases thru a EPP Rep have been fairly smooth (guess I got lucky).

 

Better suggestion. Don't buy Dell at all.

 

No one else had something closer to what I wanted for even remotely close to the same price. I could have custom-built a Clevo for an additional $700, got an HP that lacked a couple of features I wanted, or gone to others with similar limitations, but why would I do that when Dell had the closest to what I wanted (all but the 1920x1200 screen size, which is basically discontinued by everyone) for hundreds less than everyone else?

 

Good luck finding another manufacturer who is as understanding as Dell. Dell has some of the most lax return rules compared to HP or Lenovo.

 

? HP return policy seems better to me out of the 3; they're all 21 day returns, but both Dell and Lenovo ask for (up to) 15% restocking fees, while HP doesn't. Or were you referring to some other aspect of returns?

 

Huh? I've had every Dell account type ever offered, from home user to 50K+ enterprise, as well as education, and I've never run into this.

This is in the US (it probably varies by market) and as recently as December 2010 small business still got the 30-day "Total Satisfaction Guarantee" (100% refund, Dell pays return shipping). They like to offer people deals to keep the systems, though. Whether that works will depend on whether the reason for return is a better price elsewhere or something lacking in the system that can't be fixed. One example that bit us a couple years ago was that there were no PS/2 keyboard ports on whatever system the beancounters spec'd, while we use a custom 124+ key keyboard built for us that only comes in PS/2.

The reason I know about December was that the aforementioned beancounters ordered us Optiplex 960's (nice systems, BTW) but forgot the 2nd serial adapters. Dell business accessories and spares couldn't get us the add-on adapters, and I had to threaten to return the systems and re-order new ones with the exact same config, plus the serial adapters. That finally got their attention.

 

I like Dell. Anytime I have had a problem, I have usually had resolve to my situation. Sure, sometimes I have felt like I had to push for better Customer Service..but in the end all has been resolved.

 

Will have to rustle up the bush here and there,but in the end you can cut a deal with them, most of the time better deals, nothing comes Easy you know , great lappy's, affordable price , Decent Customer Service( None's perfect)

 

Hey Lee Jay,

I partially took your advice... Once Dell messed up my order i went to Denney, and in less than a day he has managed to fix my order and make sure that i get the correct product. Thanks a ton for posting this.

 

Read this and don't forget to say "Shibboleet" the first time next time http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tech_support.png

 

Hilarious!

 

I took your advise and did this yesterday. First, Denney is a really nice guy. Really seems to care about customer service. Seems that he genuinely tries to help you out. But that said he wasn't at all aware of these issues and was misinforming me like the other reps. I don't blame him for it because I'm sure the info he was given was wrong. So I spent about 1.5 hours on the phone with him going over all this. How all the models have 2 dimms except the specific config I got but my config won't support intel virtual technology or nvidia optimus. I showed him how it was advertised as having such and he agreed since his info shows it does support it. I explained the whole deal with integrated and discrete gpu and necessities for functionality. He contacted some higher end support guys over their chat system. Then they got all confused especially once I pointed out that it does have a disclaimer on the website now saying widi isn't supported on the 3d model and why would that be unless the integrated gpu it is dependent upon is bypassed.
Anyway, I didn't get any monetary offer or offer of any kind to keep my current config. I didn't get offered an additional battery or anything to make up for the lack of optimus which uses battery twice as fast. I did get offered to move up to alienware which they say has the 4 dimms and supports optimus with the 60hz panel. However that is a big price jump. So altogether not too happy yet. Wasted 3+ hours on the phone for the initial order. At least an hour over chat. Then another 1.5hrs now. Not to mention all the time I spent on the forums researching this. Sad that after a month Dell still has no clue what is going on with these configs. Still not sure what I'm going to do about this yet. Overall Denney was the most helpful rep I spoke to there so far though out of nearly a half dozen in the US between TX and Nashville call centers.

 

What Dell has done is make a mess of the configuration options on this machine. Okay, the WiDi and Optimus thing is a fundamental technology problem of the 3D technology, but the lack of a standard (non-3D) 1080p screen and the lack of 4-dimms on all the L702x's is just plain Dell's usual configuration stupidity. Heck, you know it's a mess when their own reps can't even understand it.