Dell - For Hardware that SUCKS

1..2..3..4..now 5 bad hard drives in one week. On FIVE different machines, only one of which ever leaves it's desk.

One other machine, with 5 service calls to it's name already, it sees it's sixth service call. Same issue all along. It runs hotter than the Ho Chih Minh trail under carpet bombing and the hardware keeps frying.

Once again, I explain the problem to them. Only this time it returned a BIOS error that actually said 'thermal issue' (as opposed to the Dell Hardware Diagnostics which probably have back end code that looks like:

Code:

if objstatus.timer > 57669.32 then Wscript.Echo "All Tests Passed"

)

Ok, so we've replaced the motherboard twice, the processor once, the RAM twice, the Hard drive twice, the heatsink and processor fan once and the power supply once. It runs fine for about a half hour, then BAM. It reboots. Right about the time that the back end of the system begins impersonating a hair dryer. Reboots constantly until I let it cool down for about an hour. Then after a startup and 30 minutes of runtime, wham. Hairdryer land. Hrm. Wonder if that's a heat issue?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dell

"Rather than just give you a new system, this time we're going to replace just the motherboard, the heatsink/processor fan, the processor, and the power supply. What's different about it this time is that we're doing it all at once, you see. We can't replace the system because you haven't had two calls with the exact same outcome within a six month period. If it fails again within 5 weeks, that will be two within six months of purchase, so we can do a full replacement"

Quote:

Originally Posted by me

Even though each of the 5 other machines who's service tags end in the same 5 digits have exactly the same problem?

*Dell makes a rude gesture in your general direction*

Right, ok. Point taken.

I swear these guys approach hardware vendors and say "We'll pay you half cost for any parts that were 5% or less below spec. Can you save those for us? It's cheaper to replace them IF they go bad than it is to pay full price for stuff that works."

I HATE Dell's business equiptment line.
:glinlor:

We don't buy Dell anymore for personal or for business use.

Their support is horrible for personal use, and it was bad for business as well.

metrics

Oh, and I haven't done the math yet, but I think this pushes us over 6mo/60%.

That is to say, within 6 months of purchase, 60% of the Dell machines we bought have had one hardware failure or another.

The gap is closing rapidly. I believe we'll be around 85%-90% by 12 months.

We bought a string of laptops and a few servers in the last 18 months - maybe 10 or so? All of them have had issues except for 1 server. Sad. Unacceptable.

I wouldn't touch a computer of theirs with a 10 foot pole. Their LCD monitors OTOH are absolutely wonderful.

I found out about a year or two ago that Best Buy (at least) charges an extra 60 bucks to work on Dells because they get like no help from Dell technical support.

All of the desktop computers in my office are Dells. We've only had a couple instances of 'sudden death' - where the PC just up and died.
We have had a handful of minor hardware deaths - media drives, an ethernet card, and a power supply.

But *knocks wood* no major problems.

Just cursed yourself Mileron :)

My laptop and my personal computer are Dell and I have never had a moments problem with either of them in the last 4 years that I have owned them.

I just installed 6 Dell desktops connected to a Dell server running through a Dell switch and they are all running perfectly.

I just bought another Dell for my Boss' office and it is working perfectly.

Sounds like you have user or environmental issues... :)

No problems with the Dell Optiplex machines we got here, either, pretty much the whole office is running on Dell hardware at this point.

On the other hand, my neighbor has had the exact same problems the original poster was describing with his Dell home system, we just replaced the hard drive a couple nights ago, which failed - two days - after the warranty expired.

Quote:

Sounds like you have user or environmental issues

Which purchase plan did you get those machines under?

Dell has distinctively different hardware grades for different sizes of companies and for home users.

The hardware you get depends completely on how you negotiate with Dell. Someone on our end read the bottom line without checking the fine print.

The only thing worse than what we're getting are Dell Whiteboxes.

It's definately not a user issue, for several serial number groups, Dell has admitted they used faulty hardware and sent out techs to do mass replacements rather than pay their staff to field calls.

@300 machines in my department, and the techs in the other departments say they have the same problems at roughly the same ratios.

My father and my brother both bought Dimension 4600's at the same time.

Both failed within 3 weeks of each other.

The problem was narrowed down to the PSU (apparantly the spare I have isn't putting out enough voltage for the CPU Core, but my AMD 475mhz works fine with that).

Regardless, simple things like a PSU shouldn't fail in just over a year.

Quote:

It's definately not a user issue, for several serial number groups, Dell has admitted they used faulty hardware and sent out techs to do mass replacements rather than pay their staff to field calls.

The company I work for has had them out 2 times in the last year for exactly the same reason.

The first time was some problem with the built in ethernet plug breaking off, the last time was because the motherboards on ~250 of our systems were faulty.

Quote:

Their LCD monitors OTOH are absolutely wonderful.

I agree, I have a home built system, but I am using a Dell LCD monitor. They had the ultrasharp 1501FPs in all the labs on campus and I loved them, so I bought myself a 1701FP when it was on one of their sales a couple months ago.

I'm setting up some Dell servers here at work (where you think I find the time to post here? Installing software sure generates a lot of boring downtime), and if you don't want to use the worthless setup disk that comes with the system or the crappy OEM operating system they spooled onto it, and you want to install Win2K or 2K3, good luck finding the video drivers. Luckily, someone I knew had dealt with PowerEdge Dells before, and actually knew which video driver I needed, and even had a copy. Oddly enough, the Intel chipset drivers didn't include the vid driver even though the video was part of the chipset. And Dell, of course, had eight drivers for their display monitors, and zero for the built-in video adaptor on their site!

Our office upgraded to Dells in September. In January we started having problems with 2 of them. I called Dell tech support for help and was on the line for 40 mins waiting to talk to a human, when i explained the situtation the person told me that since we have a corporate account we have an upgraded version of their help desk. So instead of helping me he transfers me to the different department where I am on hold for another 40 minutes before finally getting someone. I started by introducing myself and where I am calling from, when the lady on the other line starts going "hello?" "hello?" after she does the for 2 minutes she disconnects me and i have to start the whole process over again for another 2 hours :(

The kicker is the advice they ended up giving me was to reinstall everything from our last backup....which would have been from the day we recieved the comps (which is stupid, i know). When in reality all we had to do was go to a menu and click some things on that were clicked off on start up. We are a small office with me being the only person remotly capable of maintenance and trouble shooting our network, which is sad considering I have a degree in finance, and my computer experience comes from Everquest and other games i used to play heh. Needless to say, thinking of Dell's CS makes me a sad panda :(

Dell has pretty much gone down the drain ever since they started out sourcing. They don't care though it seems. Just look at the recent PC World poll, eMachines customers are way happier with their machines then with Dell's. And that is sad because it use to be the opposite way.

I'm pretty happy with linux on powerpc.

Yeah, I had an Emachines a few years ago, it sucked, but that might have been due to Windows ME....

Using emachines now and never had a single problem with it yet, i went out and bought another and both have been troopers. In my area we get about 1 brown out a month and not a single problem.

Its funny because i used to hear horror stories about them, but I found a deal i couldn't refuse and ended up giving it a shot.