Plenty of negative posts, thought I'd post a positive one.

Understandably plenty of people come on to these forums to complain, or just to seek advice. I thought that I'd post a positive experience with Dell, for once.

Recently my screen had been having issues where it went off if the primary GPU was running hot. It was definitely a screen related issue, as it would come back on if pressure was applied to the assembly. Dell sent a technician over to replace both the screen assembly and the motherboard...well, the replacement mobo was faulty, it turned out. Nevertheless, the technician spent 3 and a half hours here - and this was his last shift, with him wanting to go home - to get my system working (with old, still working mobo in place).

Two further problems though - tech replaced the CMOS battery, new one was flat (BIOS would forget the time), and there was a piece of dirt under the edge-to-edge display cover. After phoning Dell again, they agreed to send me a replacement battery to install myself, and arranged a second technician visit to replace the display a second time.

All issues fixed now. New CMOS battery appears fine, technician took just half an hour to put the new display in and it seems perfect. At the end of the day, faulty parts are not the fault of Dell or the technicians, and I respect the fact that they agreed to replace an otherwise fine display again because of a bit of dirt under the display - a lot of other manufacturers would have argued against that. And all of these repairs were done in my home by polite and experienced technicians, one of whom went out of his way to ensure he left me with a working system, staying until past 9:30PM to do so. Certainly beats sending it to a depot and waiting weeks, worrying over whether the replacement will work fine.

My thanks to Dell and their support staff and technicians, I'm certainly not going to say that I was happy about having to have it repaired - or the replacement parts being faulty - but they made sure I was happy in the end. I'm glad at this point that I chose Dell, and not someone else who would have demanded I send it to them and wait weeks for repair/replacement. (Also, advice to anyone reading who is considering purchasing a system - get an extended warranty. I would have been out of luck if I didn't have one.)


First technician also installed the triple-pipe CPU heatsink that I ordered. Just £24 from Dell, and now I'm running at 3.8GHz. Gets a little toasty at 100% load but I figure that I'll very rarely ever be putting it under 100% CPU load for any period of time.

 

Thank you! That is a great example of the kind of service they are famous for. It's nice to have some balance, since most folks only share the examples of what does not go well.

 

Not sure if the bolded part shows a good way to think.

But thank you for the positive feedback.

 

Perhaps I should have phrased that differently; what I meant to say is that it is inevitable that some parts will fail. Perhaps Dell are partly responsible sometimes if the parts are badly designed, or if they had defects from the factory (like my first display panel). But at the end of the day, my point is that Dell put it right in the end, and without much arguing over it. And that is something that I don't think I would have gotten elsewhere. I highly doubt, for example, that many of the companies out there would have replaced the screen a second time due to a small defect like that.

 

Thanks for the compliments towards our work. We try every day to do things well for our customers and it's always good to see that our work is appreciated.

 

One of there techs was bad, boy this is a story.... I sent my alien off to the depot the nvidias failed or something there was discolored pixels when on dedicated and they tried to swap my cards at home still same problem but the tech at the depot is who im mad at not dell.....

I waited weeks... It came back i thought i was back to normal...the problem was gone but the system wasnt fine...windows was screwed beyond usability i restored it and later found.... there was 1 580M and 1 460M mixed all the screws were put in wrong and the CMOS battery was unplugged and the brown piece for the keyboards ribbon cable was busted they called another tech put back my 2 460Ms the 580M COULD NOT do what my old 460 SLI would the house tech fixed all the crap the one in houston screwed up

Now heres the other part where i love what they did....my alien wouldnt sleep properly it would fo a black screen when waking up and sit there doing nothing i called dell no one knew what was wrong they made me send it to the depot i was worried i didn't wanna send it back to that devil with a pot. So i emailed Michael dell and actually got a reply from Corporate office and a call from a guy named Shaun one of the head Managers told me he'd look over it the whole time and make sure it would get back in one piece this time he gave me constant updates and even the techs name. His name was Mack. It was sent back spik and span better then when i sent it ... They even replaced the keyboard with one that had € to the 5 i didn't know what that meant so i thought i was the R2s keyboard then later this month i released thats a euro symbol and its a european keyboard i thought that was awesome XD just to have 1 extra key not many other people have the things worked wonderfully since

So there i put down both forms of feedback

And i still have power and Shauns contact information so i know who to call if i need anything

 

Techs in Australia are not from dells they are from Fujitsu and unisys. In my experience 90% of unisys guys are good and know what they are doing, Fujitsu on the other hand, is a pure gamble, 50-50, might get a good tech, might get one that will scratch the hell out of the laptop.

Luckily Fujitsu tech for my area is very good, and I mean good, he's often ordered parts on my behalf, just because keyboard looks a little worn (wasd keys shiny), or touchpad is getting shiny, or there is a scratch on trim, etc. Dell reps do let him down occasionally by sending wrong parts, last week, ordered a replacement ssd (random bsod's) and dell rep sent out a ssd bracket/cage instead. Otherwise as long as a part is available, it gets sent out quite quickly.

Parts will always fail, it's a fact. But how quickly parts are sent out and how good the tech is, make up 90% of the service experience.