Dell: cheap, you bet your butt, helpful, not in your wildest dreams!

So many people are disappointed in the quality of customer service today. Nowhere is the lack of customer service more apparent than in the computer field. Consumers are treated as though they had better be one of two types - either they are very knowledgeable, and know the many places to look for help when trouble arises, or they are totally nescient, and uncaring, as they view computers as appliances and simply throw a misbehaving unit away, to be quickly replaced by something newer, and hopefully without the same problem that precipitated the removal of the last one.

The problem is nowhere more clear than on the Dell website. Anything that can be obfuscated is, and every effort is made to either sell new product, or sell support.

A case in point is a machine I personally own. The machine, a Dimension 8200, was built in 2001 (from the service tag) and came with a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, 256 MB of PC800 RDRAM, a 40 GB hard drive, and a CD/RW and CD-ROM.  I am the third owner. The first owner purchased the machine and used it for about 2 years, then realizing that putting in  lots of RDRAM was very expensive, and that the extra 128 MB he added, was just not enough to get the work that he needed to do, done. After some thought, he then gave it to his brother-in-law, who used it until the video card burned out, because the machine was so incredibly dirty inside that when I opened the machine, it looked like a household vacuum cleaner had been dumped into the case. When I cleaned everything up, it also happened that the AGP slot had been screwed up, and so the owner asked me to build a new machine for him. I received the machine as something to see if repair was possible (i.e. a spare time project), minus the CD-RW, the monitor, and the hard drive, and went to work to try to repair the AGP slots problems. After a fix of a couple of traces, and the cleaning of the slot itself, with a lot of attention to the contacts in the slot, I had a working machine.

I added a couple of DVD-RWs, a decent hard drive (160GB), and a USB2/1394a add-in card, along with a wi-fi card, and got it all going with Windows XP Home for my daughter.

Dude, unless you are bucks up, or want to provide all your support yourself, you’re better off without Dell….

This was 2004, and at the time, I also flashed the BIOS, as I was having (and still have) problems whenever I put PCI cards in the machine. It seems way too picky, and if left for some time (approx. a week) will seem to forget how the system put all the cards to work. The message ‘Plug and Play error’ comes up at boot time, with that lovely "Press F1 to continue, F2 to enter setup" message displayed. The message goes nowhere, as there is no help inside the BIOS, nor any way to change the error through BIOS setting manipulation.  After finding (through Google, as Dell, like Microsoft, cannot seem to let you know what their site holds nearly as well as Google - in both cases you would think that the owner of the sire could do a better job {alas, that is a story for another day!}) that the only way to remove this message is to remove all PCI cards not included in the machine from the factory, and by the way, also putting the OEM cards in the original slots - the problem goes away. But the card must be put back in, and then things are fine until such time as the machine is left idle again for awhile. (BTW, the CMOS battery is fine through this, not coming anywhere close to the end of its useful life.)

So I flashed the BIOS (remember this is 2004) with revision A07, up from A04, which I had flashed from A01 during the time that the second owner had it. Some things were better, but the PCI Plug and Play problem persisted.

Now I have the problem again, and so I again go to the Dell website, by way of Google, as the problem I described using Google takes me to the BIOS update area. What do I find? A BIOS update. Well this sounds good, and proves that Dell strives to give older machines help. I must therefore give kudos to that, but also must ask, how in the name of everything holy can anyone know about these things, unless they are making the kind of committed effort to it that less than 5% of the users are capable of?

The other problem I have is one of date. This new BIOS is dated 10/2002, which was not there during the first 2 times I flashed the BIOS of this machine. So in 2004, and also late in 2004 - December I believe, the BIOS from 10/2002 was not there! What the hell is up with that? This sounds like bad customer service to me. I did not state this above, but I also sent a message to customer support in 2005, giving a very detailed description of my problems (about 5 paragraphs) and was told that the A07 BIOS was what there was, and am I sure I got a good flash. I’m not sure this person was familiar with computers at all, as you either get a completed flash or you don’t with Dell. The one thing that is very good about their BIOS updates is that a check is made at the end of the update procedure, telling you that your efforts are complete, and good.

So here we are in 2008, and I will be flashing the 8200 BIOS tonight, with a BIOS that, according to the DELL website, should have been available to me the very first time I flashed the BIOS, even before I owned the machine, as it was supposedly available in 2002.

So much for a well maintained website, a well informed staff, and customer service from Dell.

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[tags] Dell, customer service, erosion of trust, competence, BIOS updates, support [/tags]