some defects can take a while to manifest as system failure. some defects manifest as a reduced lifespan of some component.

5/4/2006 12:11:00 AM

maybe

5/4/2006 12:11:30 AM

Quote :

" Experiences matter, but the one time I called Dell tech support, the American dude assigned to my purchase was never on the line. I always got his voice mail and he never cared to get back. It wasn't a tech issue, anyway. It was more along the lines of a billing issue. Anyway, I call again, and instead of asking for his extension, seek the help of anyone I could get. I get an Indian, and he solves my issues, apologizes for the previous incompetence, and sends me a questionnaire by email asking for my opinion on his services."

see thats the disconnect here. it sounds like you've only had one experience with Dell tech support. ask anyone who had called Dell Home and Dell SB with any volume and you'll get the same story as I and others paint. Sure, I've had a couple good experiences but the overwhelming majority has been negative while my HP/Compaw, IBM and Gatway experiences have been fine.

There a good reason for all this though. Dell sells systems with good specs and decent quality parts for rock bottom prices. Something has to give to allow those low prices, and its support. You buy a Dell without an elevated service plan and you should expect below average support. Thats the price you pay for the low pruchase price.

5/4/2006 12:13:15 AM

^^I mean for most electronic components you're right though, they usually don't just fail 2 years after being built because of defective manufacture. Something like a harddrive, power supply, cpu fan, and other partially mechanical components undergo wear as part of simply being on. They're expected to survive a certain ammount of time, and a defective bearing or contact point or whatever might manifest as dead computer in 2 years or so.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:15 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:15:10 AM

The disconnect is that you're probably a problem customer.

5/4/2006 12:18:08 AM

Quote :

"Those hardware failures are always induced by the user."

no way man. Some, sure...but not nearly all. Motherboard often head south after the 90 day/1 yr warranty without the user causing it. Hard drives frequently take a crap before they get anywhere near their expected life due to the nature of moving parts.

5/4/2006 12:18:35 AM

You tell me. What's the single most responsible defect that causes motherboards to fail?

Also, hard drives are a different thing, because they have mechanical wear. Even if they are born not defective, some drives suffer more wear than others.

From personal experience, I have never had a hard drive failure ever since 1991.

*touches wood*

5/4/2006 12:20:54 AM

Quote :

"The disconnect is that you're probably a problem customer."

did you not read:

Quote :

"well in my experience, i have called in under a large number of accounts (when doing consulting work for individuals and small businesses) and always get the same idiots reading scripts. as far my personal account, which has a shitton of purchases over the last few years thru home and SB, i have only called a couple times but received the same crappy service as when I'm calling in under customers accounts."

I call in under my customer's accounts, theres no way I could be flagged personally. And I'm not one of these scream first ask questions later kind of people either.

5/4/2006 12:22:05 AM

^ Voice recognition protocol in the phone system identifies you. You've cost them THAT MUCH. For shame man, if you keep it up they'll have to end coupon codes and charge us all more for our rock-bottom priced sale items.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:24 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:23:40 AM

yeah, sorry I missed that...but truly outsourcing isn't the root of this issue.

IBM owns India's biggest call center.

HP/Compaq uses a lot of Indian call centers

same goes for Toshiba.

Clearly, this isn't an outsourcing issue.

As for scripts, I think they all do, even credit card companies.

5/4/2006 12:24:12 AM

Quote :

"IBM owns India's biggest call center."

IBM/thikpad products are handled out of atlanta.

5/4/2006 12:25:05 AM

Quote :

"You tell me. What's the single most responsible defect that causes motherboards to fail?"

You tell me since you're so sure its always customer induced. Excluding insufficient power protection, I'm not sure what a customer could do to cause a mobo to fail outside of opening the case and jabbing the shit with a screwdriver.

5/4/2006 12:25:46 AM

^ Defective manufacturing or, more likely, improper assembly can weaken components such that normal operating temperatures and normal clean power will cause the mother board to fail. About as likely as impropper assembly or damage during assembly is a defective power supply. That could easily fry the motherboard.

I wonder how many motherboards fail because the customer has shitty wiring in their house and/or no surge protection.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:28 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:27:29 AM

^^ yeah I always get english peeps when calling IBM for thinkcentres/thinkpads.

Quote :

"IBM owns India's biggest call center. HP/Compaq uses a lot of Indian call centers same goes for Toshiba. Clearly, this isn't an outsourcing issue."

Again, did you read:

Quote :

" i think its indicitave of the low quality of people they put behind the phones of the first couple tiers of Home and SB support. Though honestly i have had much better Dell support on the rare occasions i get english speaking reps. i think they actually pay their people something reasonable over here."

Quote :

"ask anyone who had called Dell Home and Dell SB with any volume and you'll get the same story as I and others paint. Sure, I've had a couple good experiences but the overwhelming majority has been negative while my HP/Compaw, IBM and Gatway experiences have been fine. There a good reason for all this though. Dell sells systems with good specs and decent quality parts for rock bottom prices. Something has to give to allow those low prices, and its support. You buy a Dell without an elevated service plan and you should expect below average support. Thats the price you pay for the low pruchase price."

Quote :

"Dell support (at least the first couple tiers) is the Jiffy Jube of tech support departments. They staff them with complete idiots who earn crap and just run thru scripts. At least the other tech companies staff their departments with people who are capable and allowed to actually think. THeres probably some cultural forces at work too but I think the hiring of idiots has a larger effect."

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:32 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:28:24 AM

Quote :

"You tell me since you're so sure its always customer induced"

I have no idea since I have never had a motherboard fail since 1991.

5/4/2006 12:30:01 AM

Dude, Synapse, English speaking has nothing to do with your Dell's failure rate.

5/4/2006 12:31:24 AM

Quote :

""well in my experience, i have called in under a large number of accounts (when doing consulting work for individuals and small businesses) and always get the same idiots reading scripts. as far my personal account, which has a shitton of purchases over the last few years thru home and SB, i have only called a couple times but received the same crappy service as when I'm calling in under customers accounts.""

5/4/2006 12:33:49 AM

^^^ I have had 2 fail (out 10 machines I've owned.) One was my fault. I was upgrading my 486 dx 33 mhz machine to a 486 dx 4 (in the winter of course... with the heat up to max) and I shocked something when I was working on it. The processor was fine and so was the memory, but the motherboard didn't work anymore.

The second time a fan on the motherboard stopped working and the northbridge overheated and eventually stopped working. For some reason temperature sensors didn't go off though, they may have also been defective. This was a dell desktop and not a machine I had worked on. If you're curious, although it took me 3 hours over the course of a day with tech support to get them to agree to fix it, I was back up and running within 48 hours.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:39 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:36:01 AM

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-computers/desktops-laptops-tech-support-605.htm

Where can I read about Dell's tech support salaries and that Indian culture is about not making good products?

Addendum: Also, what about Cisco's shitty service? They always had like communications majors handling stuff and I had to teach one of them what 802.11b meant.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:40 AM. Reason : .]

5/4/2006 12:37:42 AM

You could infer the correlation that the two companies with american based, english speaking tech support got the highest scores (IBM and Apple)

5/4/2006 12:40:44 AM

^^^Yeah i rarely troubleshoot that much (down to exactly went bad on the mobo) I get called in because the PC stops working...once i identify the mobo/CPU as being the problem i try some standard BIOS steps then call in for replacement.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:41 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:41:06 AM

Quote :

"Where can I read about Dell's tech support salaries and that Indian culture is about not making good products?"

Indian culture is about not making good products????? Who asserted that? I'm merely speculating that Dell fills their tier 1/2 tech support centers in India with idiots in the same fashion Jiffy Lube fills their entry level jobs with people who don't know the first thing about working on cars to save a buck.. When/if my cases have been elevated to higher [Indian] tiers i've had good success...buts its rare than i get there. I'm also speculating that the call centers in America, since they mainly deal with enterprise customers (who pay for and expect better support), have more competent reps.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:49 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:47:29 AM

ok lets go by some statistics here.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=707813

http://www.princeton.edu/desc/news/review/individual/reliability.html


so it seems that Dell has a failure rate of lets say about 10%.

What I can infer is that 10% of Dell's customers are so stupid that they cannot understand a global language with just a different accent.

Or is there a different inference?

Quote :

" I'm merely speculating that Dell fills their tier 1/2 tech support centers in India with idiots in the same fashion Jiffy Lube fills their entry level jobs with people who don't know the first thing about working on cars to save a buck.. "

no dude, you mentioned culture. Also, I dunno if Jiffy Lube specifically looks for idiots to work there. I mean I have been to Jiffy Lube just once and their IT system really impressed me. Changing oil isn't rocket science but the fact that their IT system could look up my car and tell me exactly what sort of maintenance I needed was stellar.

Again, the call centers in America are not about just enterprise unless that d00d on the fancy voice mail intros thought I had ordered Dell screen protectors on a corporate account.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:52 AM. Reason : .]

5/4/2006 12:47:48 AM

No, all those numbers seem to suggest that the vast majority are probably due to customer behavior. I know that half of the laptops the bookstore sends back are really because of viruses on the computer that the customer was unable to protect themselves against or remove. Even though the computers basically have a "restore to factory defaults" button on them, people still can't figure it out and don't want to do it themselves. What's worse is when they want to repair the problem without reformatting; it's almost impossible to walk someone through the process to diagnose and fix that over the phone, so Lenovo approves them for "repair" where they just reimage the drive, install new drivers, and update the bios.

5/4/2006 12:54:24 AM

Coincidentally, IBM/Lenovo kinda leads the business in hardware failures statistically speaking.

5/4/2006 12:55:31 AM

They also have a 0 dead pixel policy and consider a laptop with any dead pixels to be DOA...

Quote :

" Lenovo/IBM 15 percent Dell 14 percent "

and I think that's well within the margin of error isn't it? The industry "leader" would be gateway at 20 percent.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:58 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:56:01 AM

IBTL. This shit is now just troll counter-troll.


- Indians suck at tech support
- No, it's the users' fault somehow that they are receiving bad support! And it's the users' fault for not being able to understand bastardized english that they never hear in real life!


[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:59 AM. Reason : sdf]

5/4/2006 12:56:12 AM

Quote :

"They also have a 0 dead pixel policy and consider a laptop with any dead pixels to be DOA... "

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-4U9P53

"Lenovo will not provide replacement if the LCD is within specification as we can not guarantee that any replacement LCD will have zero pixel defects."

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 12:58 AM. Reason : /]

5/4/2006 12:57:26 AM

Quote :

"Coincidentally, IBM/Lenovo kinda leads the business in hardware failures statistically speaking."

where are these statistics you speak of?

Quote :

"IBTL. This shit is now just troll counter-troll."

except theres only one troll in this thread

Quote :

"They also have a 0 dead pixel policy and consider a laptop with any dead pixels to be DOA... "

Yeah that didn't seem right to me either.



[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 1:00 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:57:49 AM

^^ Officially yes, but I've sent back 6 laptops for having ONE dead pixel. Lenovo did not argue, they simply approved replacement.

Calling it a policy was incorrect. What I should have said is that they are extremely willing to call anything as DOA. I have sent back computers for customers that had a hairline scratch on the LCD screen. The tech support staff asked if it was damage from mishandling. I said "the customer says he doesn't think so, but isn't sure" They said to put it in the airmail return box and replace it with a brand new machine.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 1:02 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 12:59:23 AM

I am asking you people to post real statistics.

I have not met one person who couldn't understand English.

So I have to go with statistics.

If proving your point in a scientific manner is akin to being trolled, then yes, you're being trolled.

5/4/2006 12:59:32 AM

I... don't think anyone's actually tolling...

5/4/2006 1:00:02 AM

Quote :

"I am asking you people to post real statistics."

You're the one spouting stats like they're fact.

Quote :

"ultraStatistically, less than 3% of all manufactured products have manufacturing defects."

Quote :

"ultraCoincidentally, IBM/Lenovo kinda leads the business in hardware failures statistically speaking."

I however, have admitted that my ideas are speculation based on alot of experience.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 1:04 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 1:02:51 AM

Quote :

"where are these statistics you speak of?"

"Lenovo's overall score for desktops ties with HP/Compaq and eMachines for the worst score in our desktop survey."

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdpcm/is_200508/ai_n14908251/pg_11

5/4/2006 1:04:23 AM

^ ah yeah, desktop. Lenovo desktops are a completely different animal from their laptops. Thinkpad still means something. You'll see in that same article that thinkpads still win awards for their reliability and build quality. For some reason though, IBM desktops have just always kind of sucked while their laptops have for the most part been some of the best built.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 1:08 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 1:06:07 AM

^^ yeah that link doesn't back up your far reaching statement. And wheres data on the 3% stat

Quote :

"Much as they did last year, readers this year give the old IBM PC division high marks for technical support, and they're just as positive about the reliability of its ThinkPad notebooks, which win the Readers' Choice award for Windows notebooks. But, once again, they're terribly critical of desktop reliability, so much so that Lenovo's overall score for desktops ties with HP/Compaq and eMachines for the worst score in our desktop survey."

Also, on the tech support issue:

Quote :

"Dell's tech support scores are less inspiring. Though its score for tech support, 6.4, is within the average range, the company scored worse than average or significantly worse than average on several drill-down questions on that measure. Readers also complain about the time it takes to reach technicians and of difficulties communicating with them. "Dell's technical support has been pathetic since they farmed most of it out overseas," says Dell Dimension owner Jamie Kraft. "Their people do not speak adequate English to understand the problem. They go through a scripted set of questions, and if you are lucky, they bump you up to an American." Dell confirms that it does outsource some of its technical support but says this is done mostly to handle call overflow during peak buying seasons, such as the winter holidays and back-to-school shopping. "

Quote :

"Gateway and eMachines receive scores within the average range for tech support on the desktop side of our survey, and Gateway's tech support score is just as high on the notebook side. The company handles calls for both brands out of the same calls centers. Although some of the desktop call centers are located overseas, in the Philippines, technicians' ability to speak in a clear manner was never rated less than average."

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 1:17 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 1:08:25 AM

That's just Jamie Kraft's opinion.

I am not saying Dell is best I don't get paid by them, but they do have better hardware and customer satisfaction than most PC manufacturers.

I bet Jamie Kraft can't locate West Virginia on a map of Eastern USA

5/4/2006 1:14:55 AM

Yeah, dell's got above average quality and reliability (and sadly even customer service) with below average prices. They're not the best, and they're not the worst, and they're also usually pretty cheap.

5/4/2006 1:19:11 AM

Quote :

"That's just Jamie Kraft's opinion."

that weak buddy, 26,000 people resond to this survey and you think Jamie Kraft's experience is the sole reason PC Mag included the following in their report:

Quote :

"Readers also complain about the time it takes to reach technicians and of difficulties communicating with them"

5/4/2006 1:19:22 AM

Look man

Are we talking about English skills here?

or product reliability?

or Tech support practices?

or culture?

or labor laws?

or what?

Cuz seriously believe me

if you goto a University that is able to teach graduate classes only because of the 80% international student enrollment in them, you better prepare yourself to be outwitted by some crazy haggard in Sri Lanka who learned English at the age of 25

Quote :

"Readers also complain about the time it takes to reach technicians and of difficulties communicating with them"

yeah, tech reader like you who can't understand other people

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 1:20 AM. Reason : .]

5/4/2006 1:19:35 AM

Quote :

"Ooo... dell sales support... let me stab thee... "

we're talking dell support, you're the one that keeps bringing up product reliability. and english skills do have a signifigant effect on their ability to offer support...but thats not my personal compaint. i can deal with the language barrier. its the incompetance that greets me after waiting 20 mintues on hold i dont like.

[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 1:25 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2006 1:23:49 AM

here's a challenge.

Next time you have a support call.

Gimme the details.

I'll deal with whatever company you want me to.

and if I don't get it resolved within the first call.

I'll accept defeat.

It's a mental block.

5/4/2006 1:24:50 AM

sweet, I'll be in touch

I guarantee if you call dell home and SB support with any real volume you'll see the light.


[Edited on May 4, 2006 at 1:29 AM. Reason : V as am i]

5/4/2006 1:26:06 AM

I am serious.

5/4/2006 1:27:08 AM

If you call ANY customer service line with real frequency, you WILL be left a souless husk eventually. It's just the way of things.

5/4/2006 1:32:16 AM

I might come across as trolling, but it's just mind boggling to see that a person could have so many tech issues with the same company and different products.

I have never called tech support for anything I have owned...never that I remember.

and I have owned a lot of stuff.

I dunno...I can't be too judgmental here.

5/4/2006 1:33:48 AM

^^ i acutally called paypal today and some dude just picked up the phone. i swear i heard a chorus of angel singing simultaneously. On top of that feat he actually handled both my complicated inquires within a few minutes. but obviously dell and paypal have different incoming call volumes


^

Quote :

"I might come across as trolling, but it's just mind boggling to see that a person could have so many tech issues with the same company and different products."

Are you referring to me? I've worked as a tech consultant for the last 4 years for at least 40 different clients so I run into alot of Dells. These aren't my products dying, they're my customers'

5/4/2006 1:40:34 AM

Anyone have stats on the Dells on campus needing tech support?

They seem to be always on and always in use by some crazy buggers.

5/4/2006 1:42:08 AM

Quote :

"ANY customer service tech support line"

Maybe that's a more accurate over-generalization?

5/4/2006 1:42:59 AM

^ yeah thats much more accurate

5/4/2006 1:44:39 AM