I must be the exception to the rule

[docrock]

Everywhere I go I'm reading about how terrible customer service is with Dell. With my LX501 I had a bunch of technical problems and the technician was always at my house the day after. I called up Dell yesterday morning and asked if I could exchange it for a different system as it had more than three repairs and they had a like new LX502 in my hands today with MUCH higher specs than the 501 I'm sending back.

Old system:

i7 740QM
4gb RAM
GT 435M
640GB HDD

new system:

i7 2760QM
8gb RAM
GT 540M
Intel 6235 wireless/bluetooth
touch screen
backlit keyboard
1TB HDD
Soundblaster X-Fi

Right on Dell, right on.

[Turbot]

If you factor in the value of your time, the cost of interruption, the inconvenience of having to arrange your life around technician service calls, you may not have got such a bargain.


By changing computer you also have to re-install everything again, reactivate licences, migrate data etc. If your a power user this can have implications too.

Three repairs is too many, and each repair event comes with a significant overhead.

I'd be much more impressed if you said your computer worked flawelssly, you didn't have to read around solving problems yourself online, and despite your high standards and computing awareness, it was consistently stable, quiet and consequently you could get on with your life uninhibited.

Thats the way it should be. If there is 1 quick low hassle non interruptive repair involved over three years of ownership, thats not too bad either.

Why does Dell have such poor quality control that you need to have 3 repairs, and then after all that, they deem it economic to give you a replacement machine?

[docrock]

On average my calls to Dell took about a half hour of time -
"hey, did chkdsk and got an error, files taking long time to load, my hdd needs replacement."

"OK sir, we will have the replacement HDD overnighted to your technician"

two days later tech has my computer up and running. The majority of my failures were HDD failures which were made by hitachi, not Dell anyways, but they replaced them each time in a timely manner and replaced the entire computer after the last one. They replaced the motherboard one time after my daughter kicked it off the bed and broke a USB port, and they replaced the keyboard after I broke it trying to clean under a key.

[Mourin @ Dell]

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience and being our customer!

Mourin@Dell

On average my calls to Dell took about a half hour of time -
"hey, did chkdsk and got an error, files taking long time to load, my hdd needs replacement."

"OK sir, we will have the replacement HDD overnighted to your technician"

two days later tech has my computer up and running. The majority of my failures were HDD failures which were made by hitachi, not Dell anyways, but they replaced them each time in a timely manner and replaced the entire computer after the last one. They replaced the motherboard one time after my daughter kicked it off the bed and broke a USB port, and they replaced the keyboard after I broke it trying to clean under a key.