Taking Dell to court

The latest incompetence from Dell

The "escalation" people at Dell gave up answering their phones or responding to email.

Then they tried to collect the PC, I asked for a shipping box, twice, in two emails.

...and two phone calls.

Yep, no box.

The courier quite properly refused to take it, since a laptop and it's bits would be unlikely to survive intact.

The someone rings me to arrange collection and would I stay in another day at home so that someone *might* be able to collect it.

Dell buckled under legal threats

In the end, my case got passed to a grown up.

They are few and far between at Dell, the so-called "escalation" people not don't make the calls back they promise but stopped even answering their phones.

Dell are wilfully ignorant of the Sale of Goods act, not suprising because the Indians are in India and the utterly useless "escalation" rabble seem to be Americans, even if based in the UK.

The Dell process is clearly set up to avoid properly dealing with rogue machines, I was informed at one stage that my very expensive laptop would disappear to Ireland and no ,they wouldn't say when if ever it would come back. Certainly it would be weeks.

Only when I frankly bullied my way to the head of UK communications did I reach anyone who did what they promised to do. I had to force my way through the "there are no managers at Dell" bullshit, "all managers everywhere at Dell are in a meeting", the Dell standard "leaving the punter on hold until he goes away" process, putting the phone down on me, techs being explicitly told by their manager not to return my calls and a flat refusal to solve the problem.

To make me look even more stupid than buying a Dell would, I purchased their extended warranty which without doubt is the most dump waste of £300 I have ever made in over 30 years of IT buying.

The warranty used to be good.

It is not now.

Burned too

I deeply regret buying Dell.

When I placed the order for this machine I ticked the box for a magic sim with 3 months unlimited free internet. It did not appear on the confirmation. When, after 2 days, I got through to someone on the phone they said I hadn't ordered it - because it wasn't on the confirmation. Nor would they add it, as it was only available with the internet ordering system, not on the phone.

I placed, then cancelled, another order with a dead card. the magic sim wasn't on that one either. I decided they didn't exist, and that bait-and-lie was a new version of bait-and-switch.

Yes, something is going deeply bad at Dell

Robert, Dell's online ordering system used to be pretty much the best of it's kind and the Scottish based support was very good, but it does appear that the only thing that matters now at Dell is cost, not quality and certainly not service.

I begin to wonder if Dell will do a Blackberry and go from a market leader to a basket case in a year ?

RIM, the makers of Blackberry actually had a more resilient business model, in that they got good revenue from customers *after* they had bought the gear, so a dud product or lagging behind on innovation couldn't hurt them much. It took sustained incompetence to bring them to the position where their survival in any form is less than 50/50

Dell has very little revenue from services post sales, it's trying to buy some s/w and service biz, but that's simply an example of having a cash pile that the execs would rather play with than give back to shareholders. Dell sells hardware or surprisingly quickly there is no Dell.

It's a shame, my last few laptops have been Dell and until Dell decided that even when a customer paid extra for premium service they'd be treated like crap I had actually recommended their top end laptops.

Ouch

Jaycee is turning my words against me, not fair.

But that doesn't stop him being right.

Dell support has been set objectives and targets that give incentives to behave not in the interest of Dell as a company, sometimes these are aligned with the objectives of top Dell management, ie bonuses and stock options and keeping their jobs from quarterly results.

The shareholders have different objectives of course...

I make no apology for sharing these ideas, a very long time ago my very editor told me that a good article left the reader feeling that he was better off for reading it. Obviously with 6.5 million Reg readers each month I can't hope to do that for all, but although some people see my articles as morally bad, very few say they regret the three minutes it takes to read each of them.

I *do* write constructive articles and it is telling that you don't know this. I have written about how to write better C++ code, useful features in Excel, reviewed useful books, explained how to handle abrupt unpleasant career changes, etc but you don't associate me with them because the ones that stick in your mind have what the power elite at the Reg tell me is "edge".

"I "*do* write constructive articles and it is telling that you don't know this."

OK, let's explore this concept ...

"I have written about how to write better C++ code"

Better, perhaps ... but C++ is crap, regardless.

"useful features in Excel"

No such animal. There is always a better tool than Excel.

"reviewed useful books"

No such thing as a useful book review. All are advertisements.

"explained how to handle abrupt unpleasant career changes"

Oh. I see. You think you are a psychologist. Sad, that.

Dell's technical specifications are worthless

I spent a long time procrastinating over buying an Alienware M17x-R3, for use both as a development machine for work and as a gaming machine. I carefully read all the specifications for the machine, including those in revision A00 of the user manual. So, I knew I could easily upgrade to 32GB RAM and would be able to make the most of 6Gbps SATA III hard drives (handy for database and other development work).

It was all great for a few months, especially with a Crucial M4 SSD installed, but then I was aware things were running more slowly than usual. I couldn't pin it down and didn't have the time, so ignored the issue. Then I started getting bad sector errors from the SSD, so got it replaced. A few months later, the replacement failed in similar circumstances, so I bought an Intel 520 instead. Over the next two weeks I started getting long hangs and blue screens in Windows.

By the time I got to three blue screens in a row, I though a quick call to technical support would be in order - in case something was wrong with the laptop (of course, I was not really expecting support for the 3rd party SSD). Didn't get very far, but I did get told that support for SATA III 6Gbps had been dropped and the laptop was now limited to 3Gbps SATA speeds.

Technical support and customer service are one and the same thing for Alienware, but to paraphrase their response was "tough luck". Their escalation management team have been no better. As far as they are concerned the technical specifications "can be changed without notice" and "you purchased the computer with a SATA II hard drive, so there's no problem". If I had chosen to upgrade to an SSD through Dell (paying a 200 quid over the odds in the process), they would have told me at that point that the laptop had problems with 6Gbps SATA III connection - so they'd simply removed support for it.

In fact, revision of A01 of the manual (helpfully published months after I purchased) now no longer makes any reference to SATA III 6Gbps support and simply says only SATA II 3Gbps are supported.

Throughout dealing with their escalation team, I have the impression they were annoyed at me. Only once did I get the genuine impression they were having a discussion with me about the issue - which changed pretty quick once they had acknowledged there were issues with SATA III connectivity.

They refuse to acknowledge that I have a valid complaint, although they will acknowledge that SATA III support is faulty. The laptop does work, but not how I expected, which leaves me pissed off and no real options for getting the problem resolved.

In short, their technical specifications for hardware are worthless - they might as well not bother publishing them.

I wonder if .......

...... Dell would have taken more interest if the OP hadn't been scuttled by his own side, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/29/alienware_gaming_dell/

The article dates are interesting