Why Dell Sucks...The Addendums
Since the original publication back in June, 2002, a few things have happened with our Dells. As such, I have added added this addendum's page to chronicle them.
Also I have received about 25 e-mails from folks out there who had similar stories to tell regarding their experiences with both Dell's product and support. I don't intend to make this part of my site the "bash Dell" section. There's other ways to do that, mainly through their own customer service channel. However, one of those e-mails was quite insightful and I have printed it here.
Addendum - 6 Aug 02
Via a circuitous route, the story above was shown to some Dell reps who were not pleased to say the least. A day after they read the story, I received an e-mail from Joel, a regional sales manager for Dell's DoD Sales arm. I quickly replied to him in hopes of opening some dialog regarding this issue. The day after I was contacted by Chad. The conversation went something like this:
Chad: Hi, I'm Chad. I've been assigned as your single point of contact for issues with your Dell computers.
Me: Great!
Chad: I just wanted you to know that you have other options should you have problems with your computers in the future.
Me: Well that's good to know. I wish I would have known about this before we had all of our problems. Would have saved a lot of heartburn over this.
Chad: Well, I've sent you my contact information via e-mail. If you need anything, let me know and we'll try to work it out. Thanks for using Dell.
Me: Ummmm...I will. Bye.
Phone: CLICK.
Now this is solely my view of this conversation, but it seemed like after a complaint to their customer service department and a fairly negative article on the web about this whole issue I would have gotten more than a rather terse "Don't do it again" phone call from them. I thought for sure that they would be interested in 1) determining the cause of the poor customer service; 2) assuring me that it was an anomaly and would never happen again; and 3) making sure that the poor quality of the products and services we received was not indicative of Dell as a whole. Even some basic Q&A regarding the whole thing would have been fine. But a 1 minute and 47 second phone call? Not impressed.
So, I'm considering this round closed. If any other problems or otherwise interesting bits occur in the future, I will post them here. Otherwise, my initial opinion stands: beware of Dell.
ADDENDUM - 17 Oct 02
Today I received the following e-mail from a former Dell employee who wished to remain anonymous. Some interesting points are made...
Hello John,Just read your piece at http://home.att.net/~john.p.richardson/dell/dellsucks.html
If only you knew the extent of it. I used to work at Dell and the place is full of abused workers. Everything a person does down to how often they use the bathroom is scrutinized. The phone support people, both in customer support and technical support are under tremendous pressure to keep the average call time as low as possible. When that guy cut you off abruptly, he was just trying to keep his job.
For a company that is doing so well, Dell is a terribly managed company. I don't know how connected Michael is to the way in which his company is being run, but shame on whoever is. Here's a thumbnail: Managers are rated by how well they can get their team to perform. Call volume, average time per call outweigh even the problem resolution factor. The stats are shown live, on red LEDs attached to the ceiling for all to see. Employees are constantly pushed to do better, no matter how well they're doing already. Burnout is high.
The bottom line is, in Dell's frantic quest to slash costs they are cutting quality of service. And while the hardware may be good, the workmanship is also suffering.
Also, Dell is quite callous in the way they have laid people off. I've heard some horror stories - including employees having their entry badges deactivated without being told they were laid off! Dell will pay the price when the economy rebounds and they want to hire ex-employees back. The word is out, and Dell has a bad rep in Nashville, Austin and Round Rock. Dude, Dell sucks!
ADDENDUM - 28 Dec 02
Today, another GX240 committed suicide. One of my co-workers reported that he left his office for 5 minutes only to come back and find his system dead. Symptoms: blinking orange power light, no diagnostic lights, no fan or drive activity and unable to boot. Man, did this bring back bad memories!
Well, I contacted Dell and had a new mobo sent out. Came in the next day. Swapped the board out, reconnected everything and fired it up to see it...do absolutely nothing. Well, not really nothing. This time I had drive and fan activity but no diag lights and nothing on the screen. Hmmmm...me thinks something else got fried. I removed the CPU from a known good system and put it into the bad one. The previously dead machine was now full of life. Yup, when the mobo shot itself, it took the CPU with it. So another call to Dell got me a new CPU. After installing this, the machine started and ran fine.
So the problem count is up to nine in a little over a year. Can't wait to see what 2003 brings.
ADDENDUM - 6 May 03
And once again, a Dell removes itself from service all on its own. Much like in December, the user came back to his desk to find his monitor dark. Thinking that the power save had come on, he tried moving the mouse but didn't get a reaction. A quick check of the CPU revealed that it was on but had no fan activity. Plus the the dreaded orange power light was lit. Swapping the CPU out with one from a known good Dell solved the problem. Ah, another dead CPU. To my surprise, Dell sent out a 1.7GHz to replace the dead 1.5GHz. Unlike the days of yore, though, 200MHz means about as much to a modern computer as an all-you-can-eat buffett means to Calista Flockhart. Anyway, add one more problem to the totals.
ADDENDUM - 28 Aug 03
One of my users reported that over the past couple of weeks his computer had been gradually slowing down. It was now taking over 8 minutes to boot and accessing any files and folders was an exercise in patience. While visually confirming this I noticed that the hard drive was working non-stop. Popping in the Dell Diagnostics CD-ROM and running the IDE tests revealed that the hard drive was definately well on its way to that great computer recycler in the sky. A request to Dell got a new (aka "refurbished") 20GB drive delivered the next day. Great turn-around you say? Not so fast, fan-boy. Although I answered yes to the question about having the drive imaged with the original software like it came from the factory, the drive was blank. So score 10 points for the speedy delivery and subtract 5 for the 2 hours I had to spend loading and configuring it.
ADDENDUM - 19 Oct 03
We took delivery of our first new computers since the 22 GX240s came in. We now have 10 Dell GX270 units. These are the small form factor (aka Flex ATX) models. An interesting machine to say the least; the floppy and CD-RW/DVD combo drives are the same type you find in laptops while the hard drive, RAM, etc are the standard PC type. These units are equipped as follows:
- 2.8GHz Intel CPU
- 512MB Crucial PC2700 RAM
- 80GB Western Digital hard drive
- 1.44MB floppy drive
- Samsung CD-RW/DVD combo drive
- nVidia 128MB AGP video card w/DVI connector
- Integrated 10/100 NIC
- Integrated sound
Will these new Dells be any better than our GX240 units? We'll see.
ADDENDUM - 28 Oct 03
First casualty for the GX270s. User reported he could not open his CD-RW drive. When pushing the eject button all he got was a nasty grinding noise. Opened a trouble call with Dell. Two days later a new Panasonic drive arrived and I replaced the Samsung unit with no further problems.
ADDENDUM - 12 Nov 03
User discovered that the Samsung CD-RW drive in his GX240 was reading discs intermittantly. After confirming the problem, I ordered a new drive via the Dell Premier Support site. Two days later I received a box that was suspiciously small to be enclosing a CD-RW drive. Upon opening the box I found...a Roxio EZ CD Creator installation disc (and not even the latest version either, the wankers). Evidently the drive bin is right next to a bin full of CDs at the warehouse. I e-mailed Dell support back and got the standard apology in reply the next day with an assurance that a new drive was being sent right out. Four days passed and no drive showed up. So I e-mailed Dell support again. Their reply: the order had not been released for processing but that had been taken care of and the drive was on its way. The next day, the drive did arrive and the problem was finally solved. Total elapsed time: 9 work days.
This is just one more incident that makes me wonder what "award winning technical support" they are touting in their TV commercials. I sure ain't seeing it.
ADDENDUM - 19 Nov 03
Dell GX270 problem this time. The Samsung CD-RW/DVD combo drive in one of the units suddenly refused to eject without the aid of a flat-head screwdriver. An online trouble ticket via Premier Support resulted in two e-mails. The first was the usual "We're sending out a drive" version. The second was a long e-mail saying the drive can't be shipped until the correct address for the unit is verified with them. Being the fourth or fifth time this has happened, I cut and pasted my saved copy of an enlightening explanation on how the US Air Force buys gazillions of computers a year and distributes them as needed so actually trying to track one of these computers by the address is about as futile as trying to get Calista Flockhart to take advantage of an all-you-can-eat buffett. After digesting this nugget of information, the tech support folks sent me another of the "you're drive is on the way" e-mail. This time the actual drive was sent, not a CD-ROM. As a bonus the replacement drive was a Panasonic unit so we shouldn't be having any further problems with that component.
ADDENDUM - 20 Nov 03
James Boster sent me a link to his pages detailing his experiences with Dell support. By trade, he is a social-scientist and his small experiment with Dell's support folks is interesting reading to say the least. See it at http://www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/boster/dellsupport.htm
ADDENDUM - 3 Mar 04
Another page in the GX240 debacle. Another one blew a hard drive. The problem was similar to the last hard drive failure. Upon boot, the computer reported that there was no hard drive installed. I opened a trouble call with Dell and they promptly sent me (wait for it) two hard drives. Yes, I ordered one and got two. Yay! I replaced the old one and sent it back along with the second one I did not need (that would be honesty, folks). Now, if there are any Dell stockholders out there you should be asking yourself: how much more per quarter could Dell earn if they didn't repeatedly do stoopid stuff like this?
ADDENDUM - 8 Mar 04
When it rains, it pours. User reported everything on his screen had pinstripes. Checked it out and found that every dark colored page had a nice set of vertical colored pinstripes. I shutdown the system and made sure all the connections were good (users can be kind of rough sometimes) then cranked it back on. This really didn't sit well with the GX240 because I was presented with a screenfull of random characters. Hmmmm. I shutdown the machine and swapped the video card for a known good one. Problem disappeared. Put the suspect one back in and the problem returned. Opened another trouble call with Dell and wondered briefly about how many video cards I would get in the mail. Only got one the next day.
ADDENDUM - 13 Aug 04
Although the GX270s seem to be a bit better built than the other Dells we've had, they aren't immune to problems. Today one of them began rebooting at random times with no error messages. Everything seemed to be seated and connected like it should so I ruled out contact problems. On a hunch, I ran MemTest86 on it and found one of the two Micron DDR DIMM sticks was bad. Loads of errors. Opened a ticket with Dell and explained that I had one of the two sticks testing bad. They promptly sent two new sticks. What the heck; I replaced both and sent the others back. I'll let them figure out which one was bad.
ADDENDUM - 2 Sep 04
Laptop trouble time. One of our eight Latitude C810 units started making a funny clicking noise. Turned out to be the hard drive going out. A test with the Dell Diagnostics program revealed that the drive couldn't pass the initial confidence test. So another parts exchange and this problem was solved.
ADDENDUM - 15 Sep 04
And another GX240 problem. CD-ROM drive this time. The CD-RW/DVD combo drive decided to quit reading standard CD-ROM discs. However, the DVD drive didn't have any problems. Once again, a parts swap fixed this problem. I wonder what Dell does with all of these old parts?
ADDENDUM - 25 Sep 04
This is fun! Another GX240 problem, this time with a hard drive. The machine began to boot intermittantly and occaisionally give a Blue Screen of Death. Ran Dell diagnostics and found the hard drive had two seperate errors. Opened a job with Dell who, unlike all of the previous drive problems, scheduled a visit from the folks that have our on-site support contract. When the tech came out all we did was a parts swap. Big waste of time for him. Sent an e-mail to Dell tech support to ask next time so that such wastes of manpower could be avoided. Chances of them listening? About the same as me winning the lottery. But I try.
ADDENDUM - 3 Nov 04
With only three days left on the warranty, another GX240 hard drive went sneakers up.
User reported a dramatic slow down in system performance then a blue screen of death.
Upon reboot, the machine blue screened again. Dell diagnostics on the hard drive
failed. A new drive arrived the day after a trouble-ticket was opened.
ADDENDUM - 23 Jan 05
Another CD-RW/DVD combo drive on a GX240 bites the dust. Stopped reading CDs altogether. Since the computer is now out of warranty, we had to buy a new one. Got a Sony that should last a bit longer.
ADDENDUM - 3 Apr 05
This was a tricky one. Had a GX240 that decided it randomly didn't want to recognize the hard drive. Sometimes it would boot, sometimes it would say there was no drive. At first I thought it was the hard drive was going bad, but installing a new spare didn't fix it. I put the old one back in and ran the diagnostic on it; the drive passed with flying colors. So I ran the diags on the whole system. Every test returned good yet the system still randomly reported no hard drive. So, I tested the motherboard then rebooted repeatedly. I finally got failed confidence test on the fourth run. Did this about 20 more times and go two more confidence test failures. Diagnosis: flaky mobo. Prescription: out of warranty so it is now a parts candidate.
ADDENDUM - 28 Apr 05
Another tricky one. One of our fairly problem free Latitude C810 laptops suddenly developed eight keys on the keyboard that would not work (6, 7, y, u, h, j, n, and m). I had run into this once before on a friends computer and it turned out to be a virus (stupid one, but kind of funny). Ended up reloading his machine to clear it. Since this laptop is one we use on the road, it is more vulnerable to virus exposure, I thought this may be the same problem. But after booting off my handy Knoppix live-CD, the problem still existed. Yup, bad keyboard. And the unit is out of warranty. Luckily, the base IT hardware office had a dead C800 they were about to turn in for scrap. I swapped keyboards and got ours back into service. If they hadn't of had that C800, I'd be turning ours in as unusable thanks to a stupid keyboard problem.