Technical Support @ Dell
So this morning, I received my new Dell XPS 630 desktop. quad core Q6600 processor, WD VelociRaptor drive, dual GeForce 9800 GT 512MB video cards, 8GB of RAM running on Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Now for my needs, it’s great. Right now I just got on-board sound cuz I’m not much of an mp3 collector and I already own a decent sound card so if I really need it, I’ll just install it.
Ok so, I pull it out of the box and I’m quite eager to get it up and running to see how EVE Online runs on this. I power it up and I start hearing this clicking sound about every 3 seconds. And I’m immediately getting that “uh-oh” feeling. I pop open the case and didn’t see anything out of place. At the moment I didn’t really know what to make of it. It literally sounded like a lawn gnome trying to kick its way out of my case.
So I call Dell Technical Support. The last system that I owned was a Dell XPS 400. I’ve been a Dell customer a while. I like Dell. And I’ve never had a single incident that has caused me to raise any red flags with them. When people ask me my opinion on computers to buy I always tell them if you can’t (or don’t want to) build your own - buy a Dell. In my case, I didn’t want to build, so I bought :) See how that works?
Tech support guy asks me whats up and I tell him there’s a lawn gnome trying to kick its way out of my case! Ok, I didn’t really say that but wanted to. After explaining the situation and letting him listen for himself he actually tells me, “Since it’s an out of the box system, let it run for a week and if the problem persists, call us back and we’ll remote in to do a diagnostics to see what the problem is.“ No joke. I spent over $1700 on this thing and I’m suppose to give the lawn gnome a week to bust its way to freedom?
Well then I had to run off and do some errands. Came back later this evening and took another more detailed look around. Finally saw some small piece of plastic that was used to tie up some cabling inside to make it tidy - the tip of it went through the power supply case; keeping the fan from running. That was the clicking sound. And the tech wanted me to wait a week to see if the problem persisted :o)
So - Dell, if you are watching and listening, I still love ya. Even though the tech support I spoke to seemed like he was really not that interested and gave advice that would have most certainly made matters worse 7 days from now had I followed it with blind faith. This will go down as my one and only negative with them so far. Hopefully it remains as such. In the mean time, I’m loving the new setup. It’s good stuff! And I got my Site Designer exam scheduled for Thursday this coming week so I got to get back to preparing!
Copyright 2006-2009
January 17th, 2009
Ahhh..the quirks with Dell just keep getting better. I see this is your first problem with them, but I’ve run into a few issues.
One such incident was when my wife had a problem with her Dell Dimension a couple years back. She called Dell Tech Support. They told her the problem was X and shipped the part to replace X. But it didn’t fix the problem, so she called them back and they said “Oh, no, [X] wasn’t the problem, [Y] is the problem”, so they replaced Y. Same problem again with Z. Finally they just sent her a brand new system. I guess it had to be ONE of those parts that was causing the issue, huh?! Meanwhile, her work is put on hold for two weeks while they get the mess resolved.
Anyways, I do have to admit, they are good on their word about getting stuff fixed, it’s just that the methods they use aren’t top notch.
Usually when I call a Tech Support of some type, I’m half-temped to flat out ask them if they know of any good braindumps. If they answer ‘yes’, ask for another tech.
Haven’t done that yet, but I really do want to.