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The Company President has a Dell at home that has died a few times, but everytime I had the replacement part the next day.

This is a home system, not company purchased.

Replaced Hard Drive, Sound Card and Video Card.

This was three years ago.

A big change from what you are seeing now. That is what happens when they worry about making the stockholders happy before making the customer happy.

This was also before Akmed took over support as well.

What brand do people recommend now for people that want a computer that you don't want to be responsible for the rest of your life? That is why I don't make most people computers, because they seem to think that you will support this (for free) till the end of time.

Been there, done that with the build and support of PCs... But our company has a three-year lease program and we just started the new rollover. Then get a "memo" that basically states, "No. Wait. There are 152 hard drives that were bad, YOU replace them." Maybe Akmed is building them too....

For anything that bad, check to see if there are any class actions against them.

Also, I would try for a voucher towards new purchases or even money back to cover the expense of YOU fixing their systems. Didn't they come with support? Even a HOME system would be repaired by THEIR techs doing warranty work.

Years ago I got money AND vouchers from Tochiba because they had sold laptops with KNOWN bad floppie controllers.

I ended up getting $1500 in cash and $1200 worth of vouchers as settelment. We only had five systems.

I would also look about getting out of lease of those into a different series? Something that will do something crazy, like maybe WORK?

Good luck with this!

Was Dell your push or someone elses?

This is why I only get IBM for business.

The only push Dell would get from me is right into the river. No, the upper mgmt. orders it and I fix it. IT situation normal. They're probably too busy on their yachts to look at the track records of our vendors.

You know, I never realized how hilarious Dilbert was until I actually started working in an IT environment...

I actually used to like Dell. I suppose when you get to # 1, there is nowhere to go but down. I am going to check into some support coming down here or some kickback. Thanks for the comments.

do a search on yahoo (or google)
+dell +failure +"customer service"
(you could think up other combo's of words)
I get 169,000 hits for this combo

sample:
... THE worst customer service i have experienced in a loooong time ... Mini3Com: Msg: Failed Internal loopback Test. Failure: DELL i8600: motherboard failed; system won't power up
(from resellerratings.com)
and if you goto shopping.com dell consistently has lowest ratings (2.5*'s last time I looked) and a huge# of revu's, largely horror stories of lies (about delivery date, availability, changing prices, etc) - they are fun to read.


I was going to buy a PC from them but won't now. Appears their products are OK until they fail, and they appear to be doing alot of that.

First let me start by making it clear this is not directly pointed at any one person.

When you buy the cheapest or lowest end desktop you can find and put it in a busniess you are jusk asking for trouble. The dimension and low end optiplex are designed for home users not busniess applications.The lower pricetag means that you get the "overseas" tech support and the "do it your self replacements". I support over 50 desktops that are a combination of the Opti GX and the persision workstations as well as a few SX's . They all come with the gold support "English speaking techs and four hour parts replacements"and i have had no major problems the extra money spent on the gold support pays for itself on the first call to support. I dont have to deal with non english speaking morons that have no clue what they are talking about The part is sent out four hour and depending how busy I am the choise is mine to fix it or have a tech do it.

But what about the basic ideaology that says... you sell a bad product and your reputation will be tarnished. In a global market like ours, where a single complaint can resonate throughout the entire IT community in minutes, would you really want to let a product out of your hands knowing it has the potential to damage your company's reputation? The truth is, money is making IT decisions more and more. Sean is right... you get what you pay for... and when you buy cheap systems, which obviously use cheap parts, you will get failures on your systems. If you want low availability systems with low dependency factors, go ahead... cut costs and buy cheap. But when your business depends on the uptime of your IT facilities, compare the costs of a high initial investment to the cost of the next few years of parts replacement and downtime.

In corporate America, they (execs) don't worry about ideology. The worry about:

1) bottom line
2) meeting market expectation
3) getting their bonuses

Managerial heads will roll before an executive will give up his $2.5M bonus to make sure his employees don't have to work their butts off maintaining sub-standard PCs. Their view is "choose the PC that fits within budget", but they allocate too little budget for good PCs and when they fail they blame the manager for not buying well.

Face it...the job market sucks, and therefore we computer folk have become complacent with being abused by management...and they realize it and take advantage...management is REALLY good at that in Corporate America. 7 years ago, tech jobs were booming and if your boss treated you bad you could walk across the street and get the same work for a bit more money. I know I did. in 1999, I left a programming job to make almost $10k more a year doing IT consulting. year and a half later (2001), I was laid off cause of the tech downturn after Y2K.

My Dell Optiplex GX280 is sluggish and it's a 3.4GHz I believe. My AMD AthlonXP-based machine at home with the same amount of RAM and a 2.2GHz processor works faster.

Therefore, I'll keep building my own machines.

I wish you IT guys luck. Supporting the PCs nowadays does bite.

I have tested a few DEll desktops against white boxes, some of which I had assembled. The white boxses fare far better in performance and reliability, as loing as quality componnents are used from reputable manufactures.
We will not but desktops from Dell.
I have no issues with some of the servers, both racks and towers, quality and reliabilty has been good.
I have thirty something laptops in the feild, some failures, allthough small number.
Ordering spare parts is a nightmare. This has really turnmed me off with Dell.
If you buy from Dell, you had better buy the on-sight support agreement, as you cannot get anything repaired once the warranty or support agrement expires at any cost.