I think Dell just passed Apple as my best customer service experience

[LordLeewee]

Ive got an XPS 15 laptop, had it a couple of months and have been getting quite regular crashes due to a hardware fault. as ive needed the laptop for work and the crashes usually give me a a bit of warning to save work ive waited until a convenient time to contact Dell for a repair since i ddint want to be without the laptop.

 

Well, ive given them my crash logs, ran a diagnostic over the phone and theyre sending a tech out on monday to swap the motherboard! no rma nonsense, Brilliant!

[ShadowCaptain]

17 minutes ago, LordLeewee said:

SNIP

Dell service is great but only on XPS/AW machines

 

cheap consumer ones dont get next day engineers 

[LordLeewee]

Just now, ShadowCaptain said:

Dell service is great

apple have been great when ive used them in the past, swapping things on the spot but ive still had to book in and get to the store. Sending someone to my house to fix it is great though, not what i was expecting at all

[ShadowCaptain]

Just now, LordLeewee said:

apple have been great when ive used them in the past, swapping things on the spot but ive still had to book in and get to the store. Sending someone to my house to fix it is great though, not what i was expecting at all

Yeah but as I put above you only get it with XPS/AW or business machines

 

a £250 laptop wont get the same treatment, as yo have to send it in

 

Apple dont really have the capacity to send engineers out and many of their products are impossible to repair so have to be taken in anyway

[iiNNeX]

Service was amazing from Dell when I had my Alienware 17 R3, but it was by the far the worst product ever purchased. Quality control? What is that?

 

MSI on the other hand... <3

[LordLeewee]

2 minutes ago, ShadowCaptain said:

Yeah but as I put above you only get it with XPS/AW or business machines

 

a £250 laptop wont get the same treatment, as yo have to send it in

 

Apple dont really have the capacity to send engineers out and many of their products are impossible to repair so have to be taken in anyway

ah right, i have the premium warranty and thought it would be with certain products or certain expense

[ShadowCaptain]

4 minutes ago, LordLeewee said:

ah right, i have the premium warranty and thought it would be with certain products or certain expense

Yeah the premium XPS warranty or business warranty is amazing

 

my AW18 went wrong, they came next day, 2 new GPUs, new motherboard, new power supply and new ram

and it was only crashing haha

[LordLeewee]

1 minute ago, ShadowCaptain said:

Yeah the premium XPS warranty or business warranty is amazing

 

my AW18 went wrong, they came next day, 2 new GPUs, new motherboard, new power supply and new ram

and it was only crashing haha

good guy dell. definitely feel better about the cost now though

[ShadowCaptain]

2 minutes ago, LordLeewee said:

good guy dell. definitely feel better about the cost now though

Dell are good, ignore the haters

[LordLeewee]

Just now, ShadowCaptain said:

Dell are good, ignore the haters

i didnt even realise they had haters anymore to be honest. id only seen people saying alienware was overpriced 

[ShadowCaptain]

12 minutes ago, LordLeewee said:

i didnt even realise they had haters anymore to be honest. id only seen people saying alienware was overpriced 

Which they arent, they are EXPENSIVE (well laptop wise, the desktops are, but so are all boutique system PCs)

 

Same as I would go and buy a 15" retina macbook, no matter what people say

[CtrlAltELITE]

I like what dell has been doing recently, I had the displeasure of having first hand experience with them during there 'bad' days of the late 00s. My cousin had one of there big ole XPS rigs when that was there gaming flagship prior to them phasing them out for alienware. That thing was honestly one of the worst bits of kit I had ever experienced, got RMAed 3 times over its 2 year warranty then died the moment the warranty was up.

 

It arrived with a intermittent BSOD issue which after a3week RMA turned out to be a RAM issue, about a year later the screen packed in, a common fault, queue another 2 week rma. 6months after that the keyboard packed in, rma took another 2 weeks. Literally the month it came out of warranty the screen packed in again, fixxed at an extornionate cost. Then finally about 6month after that a mainboard cap popped, we opened it up to find it was riddled with capacitor plague (this was circa 2010... back when that was a thing), he disposed of it and got a clevo which was problem free right up to early last year when he ditched it for a desktop.

 

However I like what they have been doing recently, dad just got an xps14 through his work and I must say there pro business rigs feel like they are fantastically built.

[LordLeewee]

1 minute ago, CtrlAltELITE said:

I like what dell has been doing recently, I had the displeasure of having first hand experience with them during there 'bad' days of the late 00s. My cousin had one of there big ole XPS rigs when that was there gaming flagship prior to them phasing them out for alienware. That thing was honestly one of the worst bits of kit I had ever experienced, got RMAed 3 times over its 2 year warranty then died the moment the warranty was up.

 

It arrived with a intermittent BSOD issue which after a3week RMA turned out to be a RAM issue, about a year later the screen packed in, a common fault, queue another 2 week rma. 6months after that the keyboard packed in, rma took another 2 weeks. Literally the month it came out of warranty the screen packed in again, fixxed at an extornionate cost. Then finally about 6month after that a mainboard cap popped, we opened it up to find it was riddled with capacitor plague (this was circa 2010... back when that was a thing), he disposed of it and got a clevo which was problem free right up to early last year when he ditched it for a desktop.

 

However I like what they have been doing recently, dad just got an xps14 through his work and I must say there pro business rigs feel like they are fantastically built.

ive told them i think this could be a ram issue rather than motherboard but we'll soon see.i have plenty of ddr3 but no ddr4 to test.

 

this xps15 is great, coming from macbooks ive not looked back at all

[don_svetlio]

Sent them a monitor with subtle flickering. 1 week later I am getting a brand new one. A+ from me.

[themctipers]

personally i only had expeirence with asus and apple

 

asus was better than apple.

 

[don_svetlio]

54 minutes ago, themctipers said:

personally i only had expeirence with asus and apple

 

asus was better than apple.

 

I also RMAed an artifacting GPU to Asus. According to them it's fine. Apparently Asus believe artifacting is normal ._.

[themctipers]

1 minute ago, don_svetlio said:

I also RMAed an artifacting GPU to Asus. According to them it's fine. Apparently Asus believe artifacting is normal ._.

yeah

well, msi wouldn't take my GPU because it was artifacting with no oc

 

meanwhile my 760 died because of my stupidity. i fucking zapped it with 12v.

[JoeCoke]

Eh, I still have a bad taste in my mouth after the Dell Inspiron I bought for 700$ back in early 2011. Pretty much everything has had to be replaced in that laptop at one point or another, harddrive, keyboard, trackpad, motherboard, you name it, I replaced it. Not to mention all the batteries I've had to buy because these POSes lose their charge so damn quick. Let's not forget the two chargers I had to buy either! Add all that up and I'm well over 1000$ spent to say the least. Not to mention the laptop (Even though completely clean inside) runs like a volcano. Watching a Youtube video in HD will cause the laptop to burn me. It's a shame the laptop is such a POS, because it looks nice and feels nice to use (when it isn't on fire ofc).

 

After this nightmarish experience, I'll probably never buy Dell again, which is a shame because before that I was a Dell fanboy. Their Dell Optiplexes were just built so amazingly well, in fact my GX110 is still kicking ass and taking names. I won't lie, their XPS laptops are looking amazing and deep down I really want one, but I just can't support a company that robbed me like that.

 

PS: All this applies to HP too.

[GoodBytes]

Yea Dell next business day service is awesome.

It is only on their business line laptops, and high end consumer ones (XPS, and select, by exception, Inspirons.. last I checked)

You pay a bit more your system, but the service is there to show it.

 

I have no problem spending the extra for 3 year warranty coverage (if they have the next business day on-site service) if I buy a Dell laptop, it is worth it, especially if you carry it around a lot, like going to school, and the reason for this, is that the service is just worth it.

[ShadowCaptain]

20 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

SNIP

Inspiron = Consumer grade

 

thats the problem the cheap models get shit support and shit build quality

[manikyath]

that's how custommer service works on professional devices.

 

"you chose us for a device your job depends on, we promise to hook you the hell up if necessary"

--

sevadus actually has a story about his malibal laptop, that fried its processor's igpu on a livestream, and something like one or two days later a malibal tech was IN FRIKKIN HAWAII to replace his processor

[BrightCandle]

1. My Dell business laptop HDD drive failed some years ago and I had a guy there the next morning fitting the replacement and restoring the OS. Was excellent service really but then I was paying for that.

 

2. I bought some Samsung monitors that screeched loudly at a high frequency (around 19khz) not audible to most adults and Samsung tried to reproduce on RMA but couldn't so just sent them back to me. I rang dell and asked about one of their monitors and if I would have a problem and I got a call back from an engineer 2 days later after receiving a audio test at various brightness and contrast settings looking into the audio properties of that model. The engineer thanked me for bringing this type of problem to their attention and vowed they would change their testing to ensure that even exceptional human hearing could never hear their monitors transformers. I bought the monitor, it was silent as its meant to be, it still works and its 10 years old.

 

3. I had 2x 150GB Western Digital Raptors in Raid 0 and they have a warranty of 5 years. 4 years in one of the drives failed and I contact WD support and they sent me a replacement. The replacement turned out to be a 300GB VelicoRaptor (A more modern drive that didn't exist when I bought them), I got back to them and said I was raiding them so they told me to send the VelicoRaptor back (they paid) and they then sent me 2x 300GB VelicoRaptor's so the RAID 0 matched.

 

These are the only good support stories I have in 20 years of buying PCs. I have a lot more bad stories but its telling that 2 of the good ones are about Dell.

[Unhelpful]

8 hours ago, ShadowCaptain said:

Dell service is great but only on XPS/AW machines

 

cheap consumer ones dont get next day engineers 

I should also note that when you have service agreements with them they are fantastic. That-day or next-day and always under an hour, even for a mobo swap on an E6430.

[JoeCoke]

5 hours ago, ShadowCaptain said:

Inspiron = Consumer grade

 

thats the problem the cheap models get shit support and shit build quality

A 700$ device should not be a horrible piece of shit. I don't get why cheaper models have to suck so bad. They should take the specs down and use the extra money to improve cooling and build quality. For me, quality is a lot more important than power.

 

But no, specs sale. Your average joe who doesn't know anything about computers is looking for three things, RAM and storage space and cores. For some reason, most people buy a laptop based on that. Dell and HP know this, so they will make everything else in a laptop shitty just to have more RAM, space and cores. They sacrifice battery life, build quality and cooling, all of which are equally important, if not MORE important. What good does having a quad core do when the single threaded performance is ass and there's no DGPU? Most HP laptops in this price range come with quad cores that quote "boost up to 2.8ghz" but always stay below 2.0, sometimes going as low as 1.2ghz. Pa-fucking-thetic.

 

Ugh, all laptops except high end ones are complete garbage. From now on I'll either save up for expensive laptops or buy used/older high end laptops. I'm thinking about a 2012 Macbook Pro. Thoughts, anyone?

[ShadowCaptain]

9 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

A 700$ device should not be a horrible piece of shit.

 

I agree

 

but they have to make money