I've had my existing laptop for just over three years now - it has been fairly well used, but is nearing the end of its life. It's now dog slow, has a fairly small hard drive, small monitor resolution, and about 10 keys on the keyboard don't work (making it much less portable).
So, I decided it was time to get a new one, and after hunting around for various options decided that the best option was a Dell Inspiron 6000 (Pentium VI 2.0GHz, 1GB RAM, etc.). I ordered this just over a week ago, and it arrived this morning.
With a dodgy hard drive.
The internal BIOS diagnostics failed whenever it attempted to check the hard drive (with lots of loud beeping which was great in an open-plan office), it failed to boot, various Windows installers couldn't create partitions in it, and fdisk couldn't detect any hard drives.
I then called Dell. After waiting 15 minutes for someone to answer the phone, they took down my order number, found it, and then informed me that I had picked the wrong option on their phone answering system (reminding me of this), and redirected me.
I then waited another 45 minutes waiting for consultant to answer, 30 minutes of that was with it telling me every 20 seconds that I would be talking to the next available consultant...
Once said consultant eventually answered, he didn't seem to know anything. He could only index calls by some serial number on the machine (unlike the last person who could only index calls by order number) I described the problem, all the steps I had taken to attempt to resolve it, and my conclusion (I need a new HDD). He slowly walked me through it again, so I got to repeat myself several times. He put me on hold for about 10 minutes, then came back, got me to repeat some of it again, and then agreed that they needed to send an engineer, promising that the engineer would call me very shortly.
Well, we'll see how we go. We finished that call about 11:45am, it is now 1:40pm and I haven't heard from him yet.
Ironically our system administrator warned me before buying that Dell makes very good computers, but their customer service sucks.
Update: The engineer finally called at about 4:30pm, after I spent another half-hour trying to get through to their technical support. However, the 'engineer' was based in Malaysia, and said that their technician would be in touch Monday with some new parts (the 'engineer' was not clear what those parts were... hopefully a new hard drive). I've complained about the crap service to their customer service people so we'll see what comes of that.
So, I decided it was time to get a new one, and after hunting around for various options decided that the best option was a Dell Inspiron 6000 (Pentium VI 2.0GHz, 1GB RAM, etc.). I ordered this just over a week ago, and it arrived this morning.
With a dodgy hard drive.
The internal BIOS diagnostics failed whenever it attempted to check the hard drive (with lots of loud beeping which was great in an open-plan office), it failed to boot, various Windows installers couldn't create partitions in it, and fdisk couldn't detect any hard drives.
I then called Dell. After waiting 15 minutes for someone to answer the phone, they took down my order number, found it, and then informed me that I had picked the wrong option on their phone answering system (reminding me of this), and redirected me.
I then waited another 45 minutes waiting for consultant to answer, 30 minutes of that was with it telling me every 20 seconds that I would be talking to the next available consultant...
Once said consultant eventually answered, he didn't seem to know anything. He could only index calls by some serial number on the machine (unlike the last person who could only index calls by order number) I described the problem, all the steps I had taken to attempt to resolve it, and my conclusion (I need a new HDD). He slowly walked me through it again, so I got to repeat myself several times. He put me on hold for about 10 minutes, then came back, got me to repeat some of it again, and then agreed that they needed to send an engineer, promising that the engineer would call me very shortly.
Well, we'll see how we go. We finished that call about 11:45am, it is now 1:40pm and I haven't heard from him yet.
Ironically our system administrator warned me before buying that Dell makes very good computers, but their customer service sucks.
Update: The engineer finally called at about 4:30pm, after I spent another half-hour trying to get through to their technical support. However, the 'engineer' was based in Malaysia, and said that their technician would be in touch Monday with some new parts (the 'engineer' was not clear what those parts were... hopefully a new hard drive). I've complained about the crap service to their customer service people so we'll see what comes of that.
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