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Replying To:
Not the experience we have had... (none / 0) (#4)
by Anonymous User on Mon Oct 09, 2006 at 08:42:59 AM PDT

I work for a school district, as part of a small IT department. As a department, we support approximately 500-700 Dell computers (this includes workstations, servers, and laptops).

While I agree that Dell's temporary outsourcing of business-level phone support was at one time abysmal, to put it mildly (the resulting backlash led them to move business-based support back to the US), I have not had the overall problems that the above poster has had. As long as we have had US-based phone support, the problems we do have are fixed very expeditiously. I get parts within 24 hours of problem diagnosis, they are shipped overnight.

I would be interested to know the models of Dell computers the original poster purchased. It is known that several models (primarily produced a few years back) had leaking capacitor issues on their mainboards, the result of the capacitor manufacturer, not Dell. Dell has quickly replaced the mainboards on the few machines we have had that experienced this problem.

By the way, if you are a technology coordinator, it is your JOB to troubleshoot; that is why your school district pays you. Nobody's quality control is perfect. Admittedly, the defect rate appears high for you, but if I said "I don't have time" to troubleshoot the kind of problem you're experiencing, I wouldn't have a job for long. Doesn't seem like a lot of work to go into Dell Diagnostics and run the unattended tests on those two machines, allowing you to walk away and do other work while the units diagnose themselves

P.S. I have also found that many school districts cheaped out on the support end by not purchasing gold-level support from Dell. While standard support works adequately, gold-level support offers reduced phone-queue times and higher-level technicians.


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