Tech Support Feedback Continued III

A contrast between Gold support, and what the rest of us mere mortals use...

I can whole-heartedly feel your pain. I had a good snicker at Dell's response to your article and quickly respond with what a load of bo****ks! I work for a company that has Dell computers coming out of the woodwork; over 150 units at this location alone. Most of our units are now under Dell's "Gold" tech support which, as best I can describe, is similar to what the government or other "big hitters" use regularly.

However, things do not always smell rosy on the other side of the fence. Despite my having the direct-dial number for Dell's Gold support, it sometimes takes me three times to get sent to the right call centre. Generally though, once I get the Gold centre, I just spout out the 32-bit diagnostic code error and quick as Bob's-your-Uncle they have a drive shipping out to me.

For the units we have on Next-Day support (non-Gold), it is like trying to discover the meaning of life; or lack thereof. To date, the longest I've spent trying to resolve a problem on this line is 4 hours. I'd have to say the bane of my existence is being transferred overseas to India. They are drones without an individualized source of thought.

Case in point, I had a borked laptop hard drive that belonged to one of our general managers. This one just happened to be one that was not on a Gold contract. It would frequently develop bad clusters and corrupt portions of Windows. Dell's 32-bit diagnostic would throw up read errors 60% of the time, but their DTS Pre-boot test showed the drive as passing.

For two hours I was on the line being (plus 3 call backs for dropped international calls or poor connections) sent to different areas for troubleshooting. Finally, I kept repeatedly calling that support number till I hooked into a call centre here in the states. Can I get an Amen?! After about 20 minutes of going through the troubleshooting dronage and hold music again, we finally got our drive. Considering how many hundreds of thousands of dollars my company spends on Dell equipment, even we get the low-end of the shaft if we don't get their top-notch warranty. I feel for those that have standard support contracts. Good luck to you, Aaron. I hope, for the sake of your sanity, that you have zero problems throughout the rest of your warranty.

It goes on like this, but there's some of the nicer examples our readers have provided. It centres on Dell, as they were the subject of the article, but not many rosy stories come from any side of the isle in this tech support world.