My recent Dell support experience

[RKEnnis]

Well, my son's Dell Vostro 1400 started having problems last Saturday. There was severe video corruption, the computer blue screened, then shut itself down. Upon restart, there was no video display.

I did some research, and discovered that this computer was affected by the Nividia GPU early failure issue. At the time this problem was discovered, Dell announced that they would extend the warranty for the GPU only for an additional one year.

I spent about an hour on the support line with Dell (most of that was hold time). They initially told me that the machine was out of warranty, and I could pay for a support incident. I refused that idea, and told them twice that the Dell website showed details about the issue, and that they had extended the warranty. Finally, they agreed that the issue was most likely GPU related, and set up a warranty repair ticket.

They shipped me a box along with prepaid label. I got the box Monday, packed the machine and took it to Fed Ex Tuesday morning. They replaced the entire mainboard under warranty, and shipped the machine back. I got it back today!

So, to summarize, the computer broke last Saturday. I shipped back the machine for repair, and already have it back. Less than a week! Wow.

I have to say, they far exceeded my expectations.

"Way to go Dell!", the Apple fan exclaimed reluctantly...

[Cajungaltx]

lol... that's kinda funny.... but awesome that they took care of it!

[mccls1030]

Surprising you had a good experience. I used to have good experiences with Dell online until recently. Got an over seas person who couldn't speak good English, was sticking to a script, would not answer my questions and I asked THREE times to speak to a manager and was refused. Finally a got a manager who spoke better English but bottom line was they wanted me to pay for a tech's help, and that was included in the warranty I have with them. I hung up on them and got the problem taken care of locally. I had a much better experience with HP, but I don't care for their product line anymore. Oh well, I guess they're all about the same anymore. Would love to get a MAC but don't want to deal with the conversion headaches and learning curves. Glad you got yours taken care of.

[dbphotos]

A couple of months ago I had a similar experience. They sent a guy to my house he made some repairs that didn't fix it, he called their support people who had a DHL box on my doorstep the next morning and by Friday of that week I had my laptop back working perfectly.

[C!LLY]

my husband was currently working on a girls computer in Iraq and he said that she got a really bad virus (apparently she's a moron and didnt know that you need an anti virus on your computer to stave off virus'). It was apparently a pretty nasty virus and tore up her hard drive badly. He ended up wiping the drive completely and the vista partitian was corrupt and would not reload vista. So he told her to call Dell and tell them that she needed a new disk. He specifically told her that all she needed was the disk and she should only have to pay for s&h. $150 later she had the disk and a bunch of other crap they talked her into buying.
I cant believe they let her in the Army....but then again, I can.