Notebook Company Tech Support Comparison

It's hard to conceive of a made-up hardware problem that would constitute a "fraud." Firstly, if it's just a matter of discussing the problem with customer service/tech support, without any further money or goods being exchanged, then neither party is acquiring something of value through active misrepresentation - the overhead cost of supporting the CS/TS staff has already been paid for, either as a component of the purchase price or as a part of the price paid for warranty/service support; thus, the person making the call has already paid, directly or indirectly, for the services they're using, and are therefore not defrauding the company providing those services.

Second, if actual hardware or money changes hands, the company in question will have the opportunity to inspect the goods in question and either accept them for warranty purposes, or not. In either event, the opportunity to inspect and accept or reject would vitiate any claim of fraud.

That being said, it would be better to have a more complicated, but still uniform, hardware problem to test with, and preferably a real hardware problem so that the discussion is genuine, and to the extent you're asked to test the machine and report back the results, you get an actual response from the machine instead of having to make one up - that is the most likely way you'd get caught out.

It seems to me that the easiest way to set this situation up would be to take a stick of memory that is known to be bad, and install it in the computer. That should generate faults that would give rise to a legitimate call to customer service/tech support. Furthermore, since almost all companies explicitly permit the user to install new memory without voiding the warranty, there should be no problems with admitting, if asked, that you had installed additional memory in the system.

That should give a more complicated, actual hardware problem, that would be uniform across all of the different systems tested, and would permit the testing of the machine under actual fault conditions in order to provide legitimate feedback to the rep if you're asked to perform a certain test on the machine.

 

It would provide more accurate results, however Kevin didn't have the notebooks in question, so it would be quite difficult to test them, and asking for review models with a serial number as already said could easily result in receiving business level support instead of consumer level, so unless the NBR staff go out and buy these notebooks, controlled testing would be pretty hard to do.

 

Woot Woot for Dell. More props to them. This is to all you Dell haters.

 

The same thoughts.

After all, they are 2nd largest notebook vendor in the world.