The Good, Bad and Ugly of my 700m fiasco

This is the story of laptop fiasco that I am dealing with right now. I will start with the ugly.

One day I listening to some music on my laptop and noticed I didn't have stereo sound anymore. (This happened once before and they needed to replace the LCD kit which housed the speakers) I picked it up to see which speaker was going out and while tipping it from side to side it slip out of my hand and knocked my coffee on it. Well the laptop instantly turned off, first this is oh crap. So I run and grab some paper towels to dry it off and lay it on its side to dry out. I come back the next day and it still doesn't turn on. Good for me I bought it with complete care. Now that we know the laptop is dead we move on to the bad, the service call to Dell.

So I get to work and pull up the Dell chat and begin to tell the rep what has transpired over the past two days. Now I work on a help desk and we only purchase Dell laptops with complete care so I know at this point Dell should be doing a system exchange but strangely this guy doesn't. What he tells me is that we need to depot it, crap that takes forever I thought. He told me when I send it in I need to take out the hard drive and battery since the depot might lose them. I asked him how am I suppose to know if either work playing dumb. He told me there is a 1% chance the battery was damaged and that it wouldn't be covered under the warranty. But wait I work on these laptops all the time know the battery is covered under accidental care just not normal wear and tear. Well whatever, so I get the depot box two days later and take out the parts and send it in. A week passes and no update from Dell, this is strange they normally send an email after a week. Well I contact support again. They pull up my ticket and say that as of today it has been switched to a system exchange and it will take another 7-10 business days. Sweet I was thinking but why didn't I get an email, strange again. Two business days pass and I get an email that my laptop shipped. Alright some good luck my system shipped early. I pull up the tracking information and it says it shipped the day before overnight. But looking closer I see it is going to some city in Tennessee not North Dakota where I live. Hmm time to talk to Dell again. I talk to another rep who after 30 minutes tells me they will do a reroute of the package and that will take 24-48 hours. Ok at least I'll get my system. Two days later I check the shipping information. What's this it was delivered a half hour after I got the email that it was shipped and was never routed to me. Damn this is bad. At this point I'm not sure what to do seems that all I get is the trained monkey that can type. Well lucky for me that I am one of the purchasers for our company and while talking to our corporate rep about some orders I tell him about my fiasco. This is where things become better so on to the good.

He tells me that I should send him all the pertinent information for him to send to his support team. So I gather everything I have and email it to him. He says I should get an email with the results. Well I never got an email seems Dell doesn't believe in them anymore. Well a day after I talked to him I sign into my Dell account to see my ticket status. What's this an order? This is what was supposed to show up when I was supposed to get the first system exchange but didn't. Well my rep told me I should have a new laptop on order to replace this one just depends on what they deem is the system to replace my 700m with. So I opened the purchase order, this is the best part, and see that they are replacing my two and half year old laptop with an XPS 1330. Sweet something good has happened. So right now my laptop is in a production status scheduled to ship on the 25th. It looks like they upgraded some parts. I get a T7100 proc, 1 gig ram which I'll have to upgrade, not sure what GPU, 120 gig hard drive, led back lit display, with the other basics. So it appears that a cup of coffee turned my 700m, 1.6 pentium m, 256 megs memory (when originally purchased later upgraded) 60 gig hard drive to a much nicer system.

Now I wait to see if this is all true when I get the new system. Now I probably would still be fighting with Dell support about this if it wasn't for the fact that I have corporate connections.

Maybe this will help put the normal support and XPS support differences into perspective. My wife who has an XPS 1210 had some issues. I had to contact support and was able to talk to them on a human intelligence level. I told them I work on Dells all the time and what I did and they just verified a few things and sent out the parts. I'm guessing what happened is the monkeys I was talking to about my 700m had to many support windows open and confused a few things. I verified from XPS support that they have to troubleshoot a few machines at once while doing chat. I also asked them about the scripts they use and the rep I talked to didn't use them because they didn't always fit the issue or were to impersonal. I'm thinking the normal monkey support only uses them because what takes me 3 seconds to type takes them three minutes.

 

..and all because of completecare!