New M6500 Discussion Thread

question: the dell dude is coming out on monday, when I removed the BT card it was all messded up and the little round thing around the male part on the card ripped off with the removal of the antenna wire, anyone thing he'll care? because if he will i'll glue it back on there. I just don't want the rep to be complaining that thats why the card doesn't work when it wasn't working before I removed it.

 

might as well put it back together so when he removes it, it will seem like he might have done it.

 

Well, I recieved an email from Dell today stating that they don't want me to send the machine back to the normal return department. They sent me a shipping label so it will go directly to tech support instead for trouble shooting.

Though since this is my 3rd system it makes me wonder if they are loseing money on my purchase yet. I'm betting it can't be that much of a profit after all I've been thourgh.

Well, hope the solve that issue and I pray the new machine is in proper working order.

 

Of course they do. How much did you pay for your system? $4000? How long do you think all the Dell guys involved in your case will work for $4000? There is the call center guy, the logistics people, the technician team, some external costs for shipping. And now add taxes and insurances to all of that. At that point you get your M6500. And then you open a service tag and all that stuff starts again.

btw:
I've had two guys from Dell at home to replace my main board. The first one was well informed and seemed to know exactly what he's doing. It looked like he could dis- and reassemble the whole thing asleep. Unfortunately they gave him the wrong spare part.
The second one looked somehow scatterbrained. He clearly had some training on the M6500 but sometimes he was hesitating about the next step and at one point I even had to remind him that there was a screw he should better tighten before proceeding.
Fortunately I'm interested in technical stuff and was very attentive when the first guy was there, so I already roughly knew what should happen next. I recommend everyone to do the same:
Study the (dis-)assembling guide in advance, babysit your technician and just in case something goes wrong, be armed with a camera.

 

lol have a flood light and a drill Sargent standing over your technician while you get the whole thing on 1080p at 60fps. but make sure you offer him a copy when he's finished its the only polite thing to do

do you guys tip the techs? I've never had one show up, and quite frankly he isn't needed but I don't want to be an arse if he does a good job.

 

This is exactly what I don't need to do. And the last thing I need out of a machine I'm hoping to keep over the customary year that I hang onto these things is for an onsite engineer to lemonize it.

Which is why I'm insisting that my existing M6500's be replaced and replaced - and never repaired - again until they actually get it right.

I can't believe it's taken this freakin' long. The good machines I've received to date are excellent, bar the screen issue which is yet another outstanding matter. However there is a time when my patience will snap and I'll head firmly over Elitebook way. It's approaching that time.

 

Might be an option.
My 2nd guy's mind was definitely somewhere else, but not in my flat. And I'm sure I would have needed a 3rd one if I hadn't watched the 2nd one.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your case shows that this doesn't work either. What makes you believe the unsupervised guys in Dell's workshop do a better job than the one sitting right beside you?
The only reason I can think of is the typical trust in black boxes. It's the same with sophisticated software: You like it until you've studied the source code.

 

Most likely he wants Dell to eat their profits until they get it right. It might be beneficial to do stuff like that to a small company but I doubt the laptop builders in china ever hear about how the machine they're building is to replace a machine they built months prior in hopes that they will stop screwing up and stop wasting everyone's time. The best thing to do would be to make technician sweat when he shows up and let him take a message back to his overseer.

 

No, I mean replace with a newly built machine. My issues are from new. I've been pretty clear with Dell that a repaired machine is out of the question.

 

I don't know if that's the best way to get improvements back up the chain of decision makers. You could probably do more to influence things by emailing the supervisor of the tech that helped you troubleshoot the system, and taking any survey Dell sends about the service call and on-site repair.

In a perfect world, Dell would request a ton of feedback from the people that actually make the repairs on the systems - and maybe they do. But my guess is that in this world the on-site work is likely subcontracted to people that work on many types of systems.

Our systems have Foxconn stamped all over the inside of their cases. If you read the news, you know how the working conditions are there. People come to live in the company city and try to work as many overtime hours as they can since its the best way to make money to send home to rural parts of China.

In my opinion, the Precision line of laptops should be seen as the best of the best for business users. We are offered a lot of options in how they are built and we pay a higher price for this flexibility and processing power. The idea of a highly customized hand-built machine may not be the type of thing Foxconn is best suited for. Assuming the last American Dell factory in North Carolina is still running, maybe they should produce the Precisions here in the US.

The problem is that Dell has to compete with Lenovo. Lenovo's biggest owner/investor is the Chinese government with around 40% ownership. This means Lenovo has a major reason to produce products in China as cheaply as possible and flood the market to drive down prices. The only way Dell can compete is also lower their production costs and move their factories. That is why those of us that have purchased Dell for the last 10 years for the companies we work for can say that we have seen the changes in build quality.

Dell's saving grace is still their service. Yes, I know that home users get stuck with overseas call centers and have to deal with a lot of hoops. Business and Educational users (at least in the US) still get excellent service - and always have.

Lenovo made a major push to get in the door where I work. We manage around 5,000 pc's and around 1,000 macs. Lenovo's initial pricing did undercut Dell's, but it went up very quickly. The customer service from our Lenovo sales rep was all promises and no delivery. They literally screwed up in every possible way from systems shipping in the wrong language(!) to orders getting pushed back for 3 months. The actual systems from Lenovo seem ok, but we have already had a bad batch of desktops. One office had to buy new video cards for their new computers because the towers only had dvi-d out and the monitors only had vga and displayport in (24" monitor with vga input from a dvi-d adaptor sucks).

Sorry. I have no idea of how this turned into a tangent filled rant. I guess it comes down to the idea that when computers are commoditized and all made in China as cheaply as possible, the only thing that will separate the companies is how good their designs are and how well they treat their customers. On paper, the M6500 has a great design with everything a power user could want from a laptop. In reality its been shown that a specialized machine like the M6500 might be tougher to produce than the cookie cutter machines. With Dell, they do seem to be trying to make sure that everyone is happy with their machine - even if some machines with production issues made it out the door.

If Dell is able to keep taking better care of people before and after the sale, they should be ok. The price and innovation pressures they face are brutal.