What Dell Doesn't Want You To Know

Thank you so much for the kind words and being our customer! Please let me know if I can ever help you with anything

-Mourin@Dell

 

After reading the posts on this thread I would like to put my thoughts in also. I first started out with Dell by ordering a Dimension 2300 for my daughter to take to college. It worked flawlessly for her for 4 years and beyond. It is sucking dust in the closet now due to being outdated but I would bet that if I took it out and hooked it up that it would still do any task today that it did when it was new. That was the beginning of a great relationship with Dell that I have no regrets about. I have probably purchased somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 -20 units since then and only once did I have to exhange a unit out that simply did not satisfy my definition of a new unit. I have purchased Dimension, Inspiron, XPS, and Alienware lines and always felt that the value was comparable to the price paid. Yes, I did exchange out one of these but it was only due to a dead pixel issue on a premium XPS line. Yes, I did have an M1530 that ran a little warm but I repasted and solved the problem in that regard. Making my story short, I have called Dell support and sometimes it was not short and sweet, or at times pleasant, but the result was that the problem was solved to my satisfaction. I read through the forums and just wonder how many problems are brought on by customers that really don't understand anything about computers or abuse their computers to the point that none of them would survive. Bill, I personally appreciate your efforts on the multiple forums and issues that you deal with on a daily basis. To me it shows that Dell does care and is interested in feedback in order to improve on quality and customer service.

 

I just never had a good experience with Dell... or Dhell like I seem to refer to them.

All they care about is selling a computer for rock-bottom prices. Their after-sales support, "warranty," documentation is junk.

1)

• Call dell. Get transfered, get transfered again, get transfered again, etc.
• I called dell for a co-worker, their laptop had a bad hard drive. Turn on PC, hdd clicks, bios says no HDD installed. They want me to run diagnostics from the unaccessable diagnostic partition. I google the error for bad hard drive, they still want more crap. In the end they agree to fix it... if I ship them the laptop, refuse to send the part. Turn around time: 15 days! I can call HP order any part I want and get it in 1 day, 3 day max. Hey send me a display, yea it his vertical lines, yes I agree the warranty doesn't cover any damage I cause, done.
  
• Business system in my office, years ago. HDD is failing, windows locks up, HDD clicks. Dell instsnts nothing is wrong, adjust "HDD acoustic" in BIOS. I call back, SAME PERSON answers and tells me to get lost. PURCHASED a hard drive, can't deal with this crap. Hey someone from Dell management is saying how efficient their tech support is, saved the company money! Lost a customer for life.
  
• This same year, business system in my office locks up. Dell sends parts to Unisys tech not a huge hassle. Unisys or Dell never schedule an appointment. When I call Unisys a day or 2 later they say too bad we are returning the parts to Dell, call them. I call Dhel they send me the parts for self install. "onsite nbd" = install it yourself a week later. Thanks!
  
• Bought a cell phone and their extended warranty. Had to use extended warranty. They literally were buying replacement phones from Amazon.com, and the different vendors on Amazon shipping the wrong product (international version, no USA 3G). They ended up giving me $250 for a $550 phone that when I filed the claim was still selling for $550 on Dell.com!!!!
  
• I need two screws for a Dell laptop. I need to GUESS what is the size screw I need. Dell doesn't provide any real parts list or parts service such as e.g. partsurfer.hp.com. Just the other week a friend who owns a computer shop called me up because his tech split on him and left an HP laptop as a pile of parts. Using the HP service manual (which has detailed screw listings and parts catalog built in), standard laptop tools and a ruler I was able to put the machine together 100% without any "extra screws." HP manual says "remove two M2x5 screws" Dell manual says "remove two screws."
  
• Goes to extremes. Same friend from above called Dell for a broken lid latch on his PowerEdge. No they can't send a new lid, here's a complete new server. But they can't ship a $50 laptop drive?
  
• Battery. Why are Dell batteries such poor quality? Within 3 years they all seem to go bad. My 4 year old HP with the original battery still lasts 8 or more hours! I have a 6 year old HP the battery still works and holds a charge for 30-40 minutes. Any Dell system of that vintage with the original battery would be totally shot, unplug the system and it powers off. I constantly have people asking me for help with their replacement batteries on Dells after 2 years. And why are these junk batteries so expensive?

You get what you pay for and no thanks Dell I don't want your cheap crap and poor after-sales support.

 

I have had several Dell laptops and desktops since 1998. My first was a CPI-A. I then progressed to an Inspiron 7500 and later to an Inspiron 8000. My recently retired machine was an Inspiron 8200. I have never had to call Dell customer support yet. That doesn't mean to say I haven't had to replace parts in them. The machines I have had have all been out of warranty. The machine I have only recently retired is an Inspiron 8200 of about 2002 vintage. I have had two of these machines for over six years. During that time my main i8200 ran 24 hours a day for about six years. Over this time I have completely taken the machine apart to clean it on several occasions. I have replaced the fans and DVD Rom on more than one occasion. I have not sourced the parts from Dell but from eBay due to cost. Over the years I have never had a hard drive fail. I put this down to my care in moving the machine and filtered power supply.

I have in the past three months purchased an XPS M1730. I have always liked these laptops but they were well above my budget. The M1730 I purchased had issues when I purchased it. I got it relatively cheaply. I have since replaced the motherboard, video card and CPU. It is now has the top of the range 9800M GTX video card and x9000 cpu. It has been running 24 hours a day for the past three months with no issues. Other those which I inherited. One thing which was obvious was that it had been pulled apart by a Dell technician with a power screwdriver. There were two screws stripped. A capacitor was dislodged which forced me to source another motherboard. One on the screen hinge which I fixed with a slightly larger screw and the other on the base being one of the hard drive mounting screws. I hate broken things on a computer so I bought a new base on eBay. The other thing you haved to be careful about with laptops is heat. With the M1730, I cut out 6mm piece of clear perspex slightly larger than the base of the laptop. I sit the laptop on this to ensure the cooling fans get sufficient airflow. I will probably end up buying a second M1730 for parts. I may repair it eventually and keep it a second back-up laptop. I did this with the Inspiron 8200.

I have another back-up laptop an Inspiron 5150. It has a 3.2ghz processor and doesn't get used very often. I used to like the Inspiron 8200 because you could insert a second hard drive in the floippy bay and use it to back up all your data. This is another reason I chose the M1730 - it has two hard drives and back-ups are easy. I know the Inspiron 5150 was a problem machine with overheating and failures. I have managed to keep mine going with no real issues for the last four years. I have a second non working 5150 for parts.

In summary I am quite rapt in my Dells. I have never had to call Dell support as i have fixed everything myself. I like Dells because they are easy to work on and there is an ample supply of parts on eBay at very reasonable prices.

 

Announcement:

My final post on NBR as a Dell representative.

 

I am going to vote for this thread to be titled "What paranoid customers whom have had a bad experience will dell would like you to think that they know what Dell does not want you to know."

 

ha ha, you're so funny, let me pick up my ribs from the other room

My experience with dell has been nothing short of a disaster

like the OP, i purchased an XPS L702X in April 2011, it came with the now well documented "power cord falling out issue" XPS 17 NEW adapter plug loose and falls out?!?! - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community which dell have yet to fix.

I lived with this obvious design flaw for the first 12mths, despite the fact that picking up the power cord and plugging into the laptop dozens of times a day was more than annoying...

anyway, in July of this year My left hinge broke from the back cover when i lifted the screen. The hinge protruded through the bezel, snapping the bezel at the hinge point.

I logged the call and the service rep told me there would be a technician out the next business day to fix it, as per my "next business day onsite warranty"... FOUR business days later... a dell tech comes to my house with incomplete and missing parts. He couldnt get through to the parts dept to order the missing parts, so he left, with no indication of when he would return. He told me there was only two technicians at that time (from a group of 3) that were servicing my city (population of 500,000), even if you assume 1% of that 500,000 were dell customers and that 1% of those had current warranty issues... you're still looking at 50 issues a day to address, with TWO technicians! absolutely disgusting.

anyway, i then jumped onto the Dell facebook page and asked if they could please make sure that the dell tech was going to bring the proper parts next time around (including the $99 custom lid i ordered at build time), and when i could expect him back, as it was now 6 Business days into a Next business day warranty.

The mod/escalations manager asked me to send him pictures of the problem as he couldnt understand what i was saying about the issue... (i found out later the reason he couldn't understand was because he was not technical whatsoever)... i took photos of the laptop as it currently was, and i wrote on each photo what he was looking at and my own professional I.T. (20yrs) opinion of what i suspect had happened...

long story short, he invalidated my warranty claim right there and then based on his opinion that the pictures showed that I damaged the laptop myself by pushing the screen so far back with such force that i broke the hinges clean off the back cover!!! I Nearly fell off my chair when i read this!

he ignored the fact that the LCD screen is still ok, and that this would be very likely the first thing to break if someone would do such a thing... he ignored the fact that the hinges broke 3 weeks apart, which would be unlikely if someone were to push a screen so far back with so much force that one hinge would break.

he ignored the fact that as an I.T. professional, one of my jobs being a repairer of laptops and desktops (including out of warranty dells), that this would be absolutely the most stupid thing anyone could accuse an I.T. professional of doing to their own $2000+ laptop.

"the pictures speak for themselves" he suggested.

He has been unwilling to warrant the issue, despite the issue originally being accepted as a valid warranty claim, only the tech turned up with incomplete and missing parts, this Dell rep wouldnt even be in the picture.

In regards to the power cord issue which is well documented, this same dell rep assured me that there was an official fix for the problem. When i queried as to what this was, he said his technician would tell me... so i get a call from Malaysia from "shaun", who, after some questioning, revealed that there was no "official fix" from dell at all, in fact dell weren't even aware this was a known fault in this model, despite the 43+ pages on their own dell forums, spanning over 18mths...

he had no fix other than to suggest he would go away and find out if they are doing anything to address it... that was 2 weeks ago, i have heard nothing back since. I don't believe there will be any follow up call to this either.

in short, the Dell experience, for me, and for a whole lot like me, has been a nightmare. Like the OP, i deal with a lot of customers, both business and non-business and I have shared my experiences with them on how I have been treated.

The general consensus I have gotten is that If dell can treat myself, as an I.T. professional in the manner they have, what hope for a 'normal' consumer who knows no better...

 

^I have never had an issue with them other than getting a defective part from them, which they promptly replaced. while I may not have dozens of machines, I have bought 8 machines from them in the last 5 years and all of them are functional with 4 of them needing warranty work (thank you Nvidia, and Renasis for making crappy parts)

Stuido 1558 MB replaced due to intermittent system hang when checking DVD drive (2010)
Vostro 1400 MB replaced due to Nvidia 8400GS-M failure. Replacement works just fine (2008)
Vostro 3450 daugher card replaced due to faulty USB 3.0 implimentation (2012)
Vostro 1520 keyboard repalced due to keys popping off -must have been a manufacurering defect (2008)

Since I do my own repairs, I do not have to deal with Unisys techs that work for Dell. Parts always arrived next day and and functioned perfectly until I got my replacement USB 3.0 daughter card from Dell this week that was DOA.

I actually feed bad for the CSR people because I know what they have to put up with on a daily basis. I honestly do not believe for one moment that Dell is out to screw anyone. Sometimes they make mistakes but overall they are a decent company and offer a good product.

 

I've said it and I'll say it again. Dell have knowingly shipped the L702x with a bunch of problems they should have sorted out during their testing / engineering phase. If they "cared" they wouldn't have done this.

A very simple example:

See this YouTube video posted in October 2011:

Dell XPS 17 - Stutter problem - YouTube

And now take a look at this, posted in August 2012:

XPS 17 L702x Sound stutter with video lag - Laptop Audio Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

(Google L702x stuttering and notice there are many many thousands of results across the Internet)

I had and intermittently still have this issue and it drives me mad.

I wasted loads of time trying to resolve it. Tech support said that only reinstalling the OS and starting everything from scratch would do that. This didn't work.

In the end, I couldn't sell my old laptop because I needed a laptop that didn't suffer from random DPC Latency Spikes to record audio. So - why are Dell shipping laptops with software configurations that can't even play mp3's properly? Why are Dell saying "Dell Cares" and then doing this? How is this not misselling?

Mourin, please can you find this out and let us know publically. If neccessary, please refer this question to whomever you must at whatever level of seniority in Dell, and care enough to hassle them until they respond. If your job is to generate "positive sentiment" via social media interactions to foster an impression that Dell Cares for marketing purposes, this is your opportunity, so please demonstrate sufficient care and go to whomever you must inside Dell and provide us with a comprehensive, detailed, written explanation regarding why so many people have been sent laptops that stutter when they play audio and video. Please include detailed internal statistics about the number of customers who have reported this same issue inside Dell relating to the L702x. If Dell has nothing to hide, being transparent should help, not hinder your image, so you should want to publish this information. We can wait for your answer here Mourin.

(This is just one example of many many issues with L702x, like screen flickering, crazy fan nose, faulty keyboard, crashing USB ports, crashing SD card reader.... power cable that pops out... which makes the machine very frustrating to own. Each one of these issues has 100's or 1000's of people talking about them online. I have comprehensively communicated these issues to Dell, so why is Dell still shipping machines with these issues if DELL CARES?)

 

Yeuemmaimai, you are suggesting that I am paranoid.... *BUT* what about this:

Cited from below sources:

"According to a recently unsealed lawsuit, Dell shipped approximately 12 million computers containing faulty components and then tried to hide the problems from buyers." (Source: ZDNet)

Dell employees went out of their way to conceal these problems.... .... ....Dell salespeople were told, “Don’t bring this to customer’s attention proactively” and “Emphasize uncertainty.” (Source: NY Times)

Source 1: New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/technology/29dell.html?_r=0

Source 2: ZDNet:

Dell lawsuit: Pattern of deceit | ZDNet

I have asked Dell, via these threads, to publically explain all kinds of issues, like throttling, and stuttering, and quality control. As you can read in this thread and others, my questions have been ignored and avoided. If a Dell was culturally capable of doing what is talked about in these articles, what equivalent shenanigans are at play today?

 

I have just decided after over 20 years of purchasing Dell Kit to stop. We have just had to return our 4th XPS unit. Unit 1 - No Wifi, Unit 2 - No Sound, Unit 3 - Poor Screen, Unit 4 - failed keyboard and OS not booting up out of the box.

The support team were inaudible and intelligible. The sales team were actually prepared to lie about delivery dates in order to get the order placed (confirmed by one of the sales team). The quality of their kit has gone through the floor and l am convinced that QA has all but gone. They also hung onto my money for as long as they could before refunding.

Utterly appalling on all levels. Lenovo, HP, ASUS, Samsung, Sony - Here we come !!!

 

I totally agree with poor QC and external cost. I had on-site service came in for a total of 10 times.

 

I also would like to add some fuel to this fire and would like to know how to contact the right person to help resolve the issues I have with dell.The first point I have to make is that I have been a dell user for over 10 years .So when the time came to replace a desktop I did'nt think of anyone else.At the start of April I rang dell sales to purchase the new desktop .On the 7th April my bank account was charged the cost of the computer ordered,then on the 10th of April a second amount was charged to my account and as this charge came through the UK I was also charged a currency exchange.When the computer arrived there was no monitor I tried to have the order sorted out as all I needed was a monitor which I had ordered but I got no where.I finally decided to send the computer back and after several breakdowns in communication between dell and the courier I finally brought the computer to the courier depot myself. So in all this time I am now on first name terms with several people inThe Phillipines who tell me regularly that they understand my problems but they so far have not managed to return either charge to my bank account.It's nearly 6 weeks since I decided to buy a Dell desktop and in all this time I have made countless calls sent many e.mails and as of today 12th May am no closer to a resolution.I have written to this site in the hope that someone can point me in a different direction where I might get my money back.So any help or advice greatly appreciated

 

I find Dell Laptops to be no worse than any other laptop. Their on-line support is excellent with drivers manuals etc. Many of the problems relate to overheating of the laptop. I regularly clean the gunk out of the cooling fans and heatsink. Gunked up fans is not the problem of Dell but the user. I have owned several Dell laptops since 2001. All have given me excellent service. I am typing this post on the so-called faulty XPS M1330 which had the Nvida video chip problem. I currently own five of these laptops. In each case I have carried out the copper shim modification to the heatsink. I have owned a XPS M1330 for about three years now with no problems of overheating and video chip faulure.

I also have three Dell Minis (1010, 1012 and 1018). These are great little machines. My big laptop is a XPS M1730. In fact I have two of these. Every twelve months or so I dissamble them and clean out the CPU fan and heatsink as well as the GPU fans and heatsinks.

I am currently repairing a Studio XPS 1645 which will become my main everyday use laptop replacing the M1330.

None of my laptops have ever been new ones. I am impressed with the engineering of Dell laptops and the ease of dismantling them for repair.