[PLUG] Laptop recomendations

Daggett, Steve Steve.Daggett at fiserv.com
Mon Aug 16 10:55:02 UTC 2004


Alan asks:
> 
> Dell - Looks good. They use nVIDIA chipsets for the model I 
> am looking at, have hyperthread, and have a good warranty.  
> Not certain if I want to deal with Dell support.
> 
<rant>
  My wireless company bought a couple of top-o-the-line Dell laptops last
year for our field staff.  We also purchased the top-o-the-line on-site
support contracts.  These would be "field" machines used in a rural
location.

  Both laptops arrived with a failure and needed to be fixed out of the box.
They also failed multiple times during use.  Tim's laptop has had every
component replaced, except the lower plastic case.  The motherboard has been
replaced three times.  The other machine has been more stable.  It has only
needed major repair a couple of times.  Dell *has* respected the high-end
maintenance contract.  They've sent a body on-site and fixed the problems
without complaint.  We only had to scream at a Customer Support supervisor a
couple of times.  

  Dell's telephone support system is an insane joke.  Your first calls get
forwarded to a call center in India.  If you're lucky, the person on the
other end both speaks *and* understands english.  If you're unlucky, the
person on the other end is speaking english phonetically and only
understands the words YES/NO.  They read phonetically from a script and wait
for your YES/NO answer.  This *can* work, but only if your problem is on
their script.  If not, weird things may happen.  They may ship a desktop
keyboard to replace your bad laptop keyboard, or some such silliness. (Don't
laugh... it happened to us!)  They also included a couple of sticks of
memory. Go figure?  

  If your problems (and you?) persist, you will finally get escalated to
call center with real english speaking staff.  Once you get your problem
correctly reported, hopefully they have parts and staff available.  We had
to wait for both.  

  In retrospective...  We'll continue to use the existing laptops.  We
thought about scrapping them for a while.  Dell's tech support *did* finally
come through and resolve all the problems.  I believe the high failure rate
of the hardware and the insane telephone support is enough justification to
look elsewhere.  
</rant> 

Steve D...




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