Modern Sisyphus

or why M. will never, ever buy another Dell again. Ever.

M.'s nephew is heading off to college. Being the good uncle that he is, he wanted to make sure he had a working computer, so bought a new computer and gave his nephew the old one. Old being 1.6 GHz P4 mind you. The new one was kick ass: 3.06 HT, 1gb RAM, beastly video card, etc.

It arrived about 3 months ago. He took it out of the box, and started booting it up. BSOD. (For those non-compu-geeks, this means, Blue Screen of Death -- the critical windows failure that forces a one-finger salute to your computer to reboot.) M. shrugged it off as old drivers -- given that this machine had cutting edge everything, it is likely that drivers are going to be a little beta.

But it kept crashing. Week after week, day after day.

Realizing that it was not a software issue at all, but a hardware, M. embarked on what I can only call a saintly journey through the hell's of Dell's phone support system. Long wait times (but maybe not that bad in the industry), dumb tech support people (
Them: "What is your floppy doing right now?"
M: "I don't HAVE a floppy drive."
Them: "Well, what do you have?"
M: "Please take a moment to read over my system configuration on your screen."
Them: "Oh. You don't have a floppy drive."
M: "Right" )

But what really capped the phone calls is the almost defiant unhelpful attitude of the tech support team. With statements like "Well, what do you want me to do about it?" as one of the opening lines of a tech support call, can you ever really get a warm fuzzy feeling about them?

So, it has been over 1 month since he started grappling with them. He has re-formatted and re-installed Windows XP more than 6 times that I know of. They send out a new hard drive which basically hit the re-set button on all of the hoops that they made him jump through in order to get a replacement. Each time the suggest something more inane than the last time -- two nights ago, they told him to adjust the page file size of the operating system. Um, no. There is no way that the page file size could be responsible for BSOD after installing just the operating system and letting it run over night. And this was from the next level up of tech support.

We have run the Windows memory diagnostics: we can watch the failures as the system says "ERROR: Expected: XX93894X Received: 0000000" Telling Dell this seems to have no impact -- it can't possibly be the memory or the CPU.

They have e-surveyed him twice. Twice he has told the truth and gotten no response. Why bother sending the survey at all?

The only hope is that the sheer number entries is wearing even them down and he gets hints from some of the friendlier staff if he just holds in a little longer they will get him a new machine. But it too late.

This is a text book example of how to turn a consistent customer into a former one. Since I have known M, he has always bought dells. He has bought 6 computers from them since I have known him. This was the last. In the all the re-formats, he pretty much wrote off the computer as a tool because in a day he may to have start from scratch, so he bought a IBM ThinkPad T series laptop.

Now it is just a matter of finishing what he started.

But I am just beginning: consider this my first shout from the eMountain. "Dell's tech support sucks. If you want to get support for products, don't buy a Dell." A happy customer tells 3 friends. An unhappy one has a boyfriend blogging to the world about it.