It's not just their overseas call centers... It's their whole d@mn customer support system system. It can only be called "Dell Hell" once you enter into it.
I was ordering some parts for various workstations and servers we have have around the office... I also threw in a couple of ram chips for my mom's media center (her MCE 2005 is a Dell... and as I am an owner, I took a little liberty with the PO).
Upgraded the machines here at the office fine... threw the chips into slots #2 & 4 of her machine and flipped it on. Nothing... by the time I went through my mental checklist of what would cause no beeps or video ("video card... nah... ram... WAIT A SECOND!") it was too late. The smell of burning plastic assaulted me. D@mn chip #2 had shorted itself out and was hot enough to start wilting the affixed label. I yanked the power cord out and had to "hot potato" the chip out of there. Still have it, prolly going to frame it.
The chip fried slots #2 and #4 and the IDE controller (the CD/DVD would play peek-a-boo with BIOS). And then began my descent into Dell Hell. At least 20 emails, at least 7 different techs who contradicted each other on how they were going handle the problem (one said, "we will send you a new MB, give us your address", I did that and then another said "we cannot send you a new MB" ad nauseum), two to three months time, and after at least 2 or 3 emails badgering each d@mn tech about what they were going to propose next, they finally they send a guy out to replace the MB. And he brings the wrong chips. Feh.
In the end, they sent more chips and I popped those in there and everything seemed OK. Except, of course, all the connected peripheals at the time of the almost-bonfire are acting funny now (as I told them would happen at the beginning of my experience in Dell Hell): the CD/DVD sometimes recognizes a disk, sometimes doesn't ... though it will maintain its' presence in BIOS now, the dual tuner sometimes recognizes it has two tuners, sometimes doesn't.
H3ll, this is the abbreviated version.
ENGADGET: you guys need a story about Dell Hell? I've kept all my notes and emails ... and like I told them in the beginning, this would have been real "funny" if my mom had taken her computer back to her apartment in a multi-story high rise assisted living development and the chip *then* decided to short out.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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It's not just their overseas call centers... It's their whole d@mn customer support system system. It can only be called "Dell Hell" once you enter into it.
I was ordering some parts for various workstations and servers we have have around the office... I also threw in a couple of ram chips for my mom's media center (her MCE 2005 is a Dell... and as I am an owner, I took a little liberty with the PO).
Upgraded the machines here at the office fine... threw the chips into slots #2 & 4 of her machine and flipped it on. Nothing... by the time I went through my mental checklist of what would cause no beeps or video ("video card... nah... ram... WAIT A SECOND!") it was too late. The smell of burning plastic assaulted me. D@mn chip #2 had shorted itself out and was hot enough to start wilting the affixed label. I yanked the power cord out and had to "hot potato" the chip out of there. Still have it, prolly going to frame it.
The chip fried slots #2 and #4 and the IDE controller (the CD/DVD would play peek-a-boo with BIOS). And then began my descent into Dell Hell.
At least 20 emails, at least 7 different techs who contradicted each other on how they were going handle the problem (one said, "we will send you a new MB, give us your address", I did that and then another said "we cannot send you a new MB" ad nauseum), two to three months time, and after at least 2 or 3 emails badgering each d@mn tech about what they were going to propose next, they finally they send a guy out to replace the MB. And he brings the wrong chips. Feh.
In the end, they sent more chips and I popped those in there and everything seemed OK. Except, of course, all the connected peripheals at the time of the almost-bonfire are acting funny now (as I told them would happen at the beginning of my experience in Dell Hell): the CD/DVD sometimes recognizes a disk, sometimes doesn't ... though it will maintain its' presence in BIOS now, the dual tuner sometimes recognizes it has two tuners, sometimes doesn't.
H3ll, this is the abbreviated version.
ENGADGET: you guys need a story about Dell Hell? I've kept all my notes and emails ... and like I told them in the beginning, this would have been real "funny" if my mom had taken her computer back to her apartment in a multi-story high rise assisted living development and the chip *then* decided to short out.