Changed my mind about Dell

I know we have had discussions about Dell before and I was one that praised them. Well the last few calls is changing my mind and last night they pretty much changed my mind for good. Read my lips, "NO MORE DELLS".

Ten months ago I bought a lap top for my daughter for school. When recieved I thought it ran awfully slow. It would take ten minutes at times just to boot up. And when you would start a program it would take for ever to start that also. If we ran check disk it would kind of come out of it but I was never happy with it. After three calls to Dell I just kind of gave up on it, my daughter got use to it and so on. Last night it would not boot up. I ran it through some start up test and pretty much figured out the hard drive was bad. I call Dell, they confirm the hard drive is bad. Not a problem it's under a year and should be covered under warranty. NOT, this laptop only comes with a 90 day warranty. I complained and wrote a few emails to Dell and about all I got out of them was they didn't have the authority to replace it free of charge. One of the Dell's tech support people told me to call a number and ask for a refurbished one. So I call and it's $75.00. Ok that was the price for a new one so I asked the guy what the price for the refurbished one was, $189.00. I said what, why would you ever rebuild one if you can get new for less. His answer was well this is one that actually came back from someone that didn't need it???

My problem is they snuck the 90 day warranty sucks, and I seriously think the hard drive was bad from day 1 basd on the speed of the thing.

So I am now an X Dell customer, never to be again.

murph

Welcome to the ranks of "ex" Dell customers. After my experiences with Dell Hell, they will never get another dime from me. Nobody will ever convince me that they have not taken a steep nose dive into the land of Packard Bell and Gateway. It's not wonder that many people, like me, are now suddenly beginning to look at Mac machines when I'd never consider one in the past.

This is not making me very happy...
I have 4 Dell's in my home office and (knock on wood), so far, they're relatively stable.
If one goes, I'm now pretty convinced that I'll have to look elsewhere.

At the office we purchased 80 desktops at once. So far we have had 50 some motherboards replaced under warranty. And maybe 12 HDD's. These machines are maybe 2 years old. I hope that they have changed suppliers by now.

My son (jtudor14 here) is looking for a new laptop right now. Last I heard, last night, he had decided on a new Dell

My wife needs a new laptop. Largely to run Microsoft Access. That is one of the few programs that Microsoft has not made a Mac version of.

I'm at a total loss as to what to buy. At work we have had so many bad experiences with Dell that I don't want to try Dell. IBM laptops are no longer IBM, so I'm not sure if they are good anymore, but they used to be awesome. We have some Toshiba laptops at work, but they are clunky compared to the IBM units we have.

I'm confused and simply delaying the purchase!

I've had one of these for 8 months and it's been a great machine so far, 64 bit ready! It goes against what people warn you about.....HP, Athlon etc. but I have nothing bad to say about it, YET!

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/search/search_request.do

B_Skurka said:

I'm confused and simply delaying the purchase!

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Personally, I have never been a fan of Dell laptops. Their desktops are pretty decent in my experience though. For a laptop, I used to be a Compaq fan, but since the merger with HP, eh....not so much. My current laptop is a Toshiba, and I really couldn't be happier.

Well, maybe a Mac Book Pro would make me happier, but oh well.

DaveNay said:

My current laptop is a Toshiba, and I really couldn't be happier.

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Dave,

Didn't somebody post here a customer survey and Toshiba laptops was rated the best? I will have to try and do some searching

Murph, what do you mean by rated the best-best machines or best service? I've been buying and recommending Dells for years. I too have seen customer service fall off. As soon as I quit being able to understand what the service rep was saying was when it seems to have gone bad. However, it seems that, as much as Dell's service has fallen off it's still as good as anybody else out there, except Apple. Basically, none of 'em are any good.
Here's the latest CS ratings I could find: www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,103959,00.html

The pre-Lenovo Thinkpads were solid as a rock.

Any one know how they are since the Lenovo buyout?

I'm wondering the same thing about the Lenovo laptops. Our IBM Thinkpads are awesome, almost equal to the quality of an Apple PowerBook. I've bought stock in Lenovo because I like their business model, but I'm not yet ready to buy one of their laptops!!!

Knock on wood, I have never had any issues with my Gateways. (2 desktops and one laptop.)

I'd buy there again and recomend them.

Hutchman said:

Murph, what do you mean by rated the best-best machines or best service?

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Found the chart.

I guess the chart is for answering questions the best. Not so that it means anything other than maybe the best service??

Alls I know is my next laptop possibly will be a Apple. If it will run a program called Ultra-site there would be no question. The company that wrote Ultra-Site says there is no way to make the Apple work on their program??


murph

Bought a Dell laptop in 2000 before our first winter trip to Florida, the last three years have taken the standard PC as do not have the broadband connection on the laptop, did not like the funky keyboard on laptop anyway.

It still gets used upon occasion, my son just purchased a new power cord for it, other than that, no problems.

It was purchased as a refurbished. But just like everything else, I am sure the quality has gone down hill.

I have three Dell laptops in my family/business. Two of them have been great no problems nor do I remember ever really having to call in on them. Must have 25 desktops of which most are Dell. No realy problems, but they are all prior 2004. They just seem to have gone down hill when it comes to service.


murph