Tech Support Feedback Continued II

More business woes...

Unfortunately your experience is neither an isolated incident, or unusual when dealing with Dell. I work in an environment consisting of 2300 Dell workstations, split evenly between laptops and desktops. The support technicians in my group would spend a minimum of 1 hour per call to Dell for tech support, and we ONLY called them for hardware issues.

It got so bad that myself and another tech became DCSE's, Dell Certified System Engineers, which is a ridiculous joke of a certification, so that we can order parts online from Dell directly. The program has cost the company around $400(us) a year, and saved us over 100 man hours previously wasted trying to pry the replacement parts from Dell. My personal favourite story regarding Dell tech support is below.

I was informed by a Dell support document that a particular problem we were having was resolved by updating the BIOS. I went to the Dell support site, downloaded the latest BIOS for the model, and updated the system. I was rewarded with a system that would not boot at all. All I would get is a black screen with the word Dell in large blue letters and a website, www.dell.com.

I called tech support to get the system board replaced, as the system would not even spin up the drives. I explained the problem to the technician, and to my amazement he asked me what OS I was running. I assumed he had not heard me, or was not listening, so I explained the problem again. Again he asked me for the OS. I explained to him that, as the machine would not POST, the OS was irrelevant.

He then asked me to run the Dell hard disk diagnostic. I responded that I would be happy to do so, if the machine would turn on enough to boot to a CD, but as it would not even POST, I could not do it right now. This is went on for 30 minutes until I, indignantly demanded a system board be sent out. He put me on hold for 25 minutes. When he came back on he informed me he had solved my problem, and that a system board was being shipped out. When I asked how he had solved my problem, he informed me that the version of the BIOS I had used was defective, and broke my machine. When I asked him why a defective BIOS, with a known problem was posted on their website, he informed me that the website was not his responsibility.

Let's hear it for Dell's award winning support. I wish I could say that this was abnormal, but in my experience this is the rule, not the exception.