The Dell Situation

Post by **Leisher** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 10:12 am

The story I promised...

In addition to my normal Q1 orders from Dell, usually a 25% replacement of desktops, laptops, and servers in the company, I was also ordering two home PCs for me and my network support tech. A little perk is that we can tweak these more than the standard builds we purchase.

As I was researching I noticed that Alienware is now a part of Dell. I did not know that and began specing out a PC through them.

I called my Dell sales rep and he told me that he couldn't sell me an Alienware machine. I'm still confused by this stupidity and said so in my letter to Michael Dell.

Well, I did have the option of simply not ordering these two PCs through him, but decided that I'd get the XPSs. He's been a good sales rep, the XPSs I got before were pretty good, and the machine just won machine of the year in some media member's mind (I forgot who).

Now when I ordered my last XPS, in was ordered the same way, totally customized. It also took a week and a half before I got a notice that it was finally ready to ship. This time, I got the notice on the 2nd day after I placed the order. That worried me.

The XPSs arrived and had obviously just had a ghost image slapped onto them that didn't match the configuration I ordered. First of all, it wasn't "tweaked" at all, which they advertise that it's supposed to be.

The biggest problem that was most apparent was the hard drive space. Drive C was "fine" (if you can call 4 partitions on a 250GB drive fine). Drive D, however was supposed to be a 750GB drive and it was showing only 238GB.

I tried to change this through Windows and was told access denied no matter which way I attempted.

I then inserted the Windows CD and tried to change the partition by booting from it only to hit the blue screen of death every single time. Apparently, that is a flaw in Windows Media Center which was the only OS without "Vista" in it that we were allowed to put on the system via Dell's fantastic "customization" options.

I had to insert the CD while the PC was running and to be able to access the part of setup where I can toy with the partitions.

As it turned out, they simply didn't bother adding the other 500GB to my partition for drive D.

There were other little nitpicky things, not to mention the horde of crap software they preload, so to save time and undue any other shit they might've fucked up I went ahead and just scratched and reloaded. I mean, how can I trust a PC that was built with an image that doesn't apply to it?

Worse yet, on the drivers CD that is supposed to contain all your systems drivers, only a single driver on that CD applied to my system. They system did not come with any CD that had my video drivers. I had to go get them off the web.

Even worse is that had I bought an Alienware, they DO tweak and test their systems. They get them to the best possible performance before shipping them out the door.

Keep in mind, this is THE SAME COMPANY, and these are competing products. One branch slaps on a generalized image and doesn't give a fuck what state your PC is in, the other tweaks and tests to send out the best possible product.

The most frustrating part, however, is that I have no recourse within Dell. My sales rep has no power to do anything about my total dissatisfaction with what occurred, nor is he responsible for building it. But he's my only option in terms of talking to someone. Thus, the letter to Michael Dell, my rep, and my rep's boss, which was sent out at the end of day yesterday.

In no way is it acceptable for Dell to ship out a PC in that state. Take away all the questions about RAM, the crap customization options, the complete negligence and apathy that went into building the system, all the minor issues that were either bullshit or broken, and just focus on the hard drives alone, and you're still left with a system that shouldn't have shipped. The average user would not have realized that they received less than half of the 1 TB they ordered. Even if they did, who would've fixed it for them? Dell support? Does anyone think an Indian reading out of a book could've walked someone through this process?

The whole process reeks of corporate penny pinching and a lack of respect for consumers.

In contrast, the other desktops and laptops I ordered all came perfect. I NEVER have any trouble with the business machines I order.

So, in summary, I ordered a machine and it did not arrive as advertised. I have it there now, but I had to scratch, reload, and tweak it myself. That shouldn't happen when you're buying a product that's guaranteed to work out of the box. Thus, Michael Dell got a letter. If by some miracle I ever get a response, I'll let you all know.

Post by **TheCatt** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 11:53 am

I ordered an XPS 420 in January.

It comes with an eSATA port.

Guess what doesn't work using the stock build they provide? It would require an entire OS reload to get it to work. The good news is that the 2 drive arrays I bought each come with eSATA cards.

I order my wife a 12" XPS laptop about a year ago. It comes with Roxio.

Guess what doesn't work with Windows Vista?

Post by **thibodeaux** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:07 pm

I have not been really happy with the Dell laptop I have at home.

Post by **Leisher** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:52 pm

I order my wife a 12" XPS laptop about a year ago. It comes with Roxio.

Guess what doesn't work with Windows Vista?

I ran into that same problem on a desktop I bought for testing Vista here. Roxio comes pre-installed on a system that doesn't work? Do they have any QA there?

Post by **Cakedaddy** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 2:32 pm

You should have returned them. You have 21 days to get a full refund, including shipping to you. You just have to pay the shipping to get it back to them.

We bought a laptop a while back. 19 days later, it went on sale for $600 less. I asked for a price match. They would only offer me $250. But, I was able to return it (for $27) and just ordered a new one for $600 less. The same person that told me they could not price match gave me my RMA number to send it back (during the same conversation, so she new what I was doing). So, I still got my $600 discount (minus $27 shipping) and they were stuck with a used laptop they had to sell at a discount.

Oh, I've got 3 Dell laptops right now, and like them all. Wife's XPS has a loose power. . . hole. So, her power supply comes out easily. That's the only complaint I have.

Mine takes a decent beating too. Runs fine though.

Edited By Cakedaddy on 1204831949

DoctorChaos · Post by **DoctorChaos** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 7:58 pm

I guess that guy didn't leave.
Let's back up a bit. I was living and working in Austin and had to interview some potential co-workers. One of my co-workers comes in and says and I quote "You've got to see this fuckin' guy" Always up for a freak show, I went in to interview him. The room is big enough to hold only a table and two chairs. I walk in and there sits a stick thin guy with long greazy hair dressed in an off-white dress shirt. I think it was bought white. I thought the guy was high on meth or some shit. Our secretary confirmed it, evidently she was a user for a while. In the course of the interview I learn he's with Dell and writes install scripts. He automated the install so he didn't have to sit there and click the buttons or restart it, that type of thing. As he's talking he grabs the table and starts crawling over it. Naturally, I become little nervous. I think at that point I thanked him for his time and got the fuck up out of there. We didn't hire him, but damn we got some good stories out of it.

Post by **TheCatt** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 7:48 am

So the whole issue I had with the XBOX 360 and Vista appears to have been due to Dell as well.

I gave up trying to fix the issues with my Dell image, and scratched and completely reloaded yesterday afternoon. XBox 360 issue resolved. eSATA issue resolved.

And I went ahead and gave myself an upgrade to Ultimate while I was at it since MS will be sending me a copy shortly for the spying program.

Ultimate is the only version that should ever have been released.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Tue Nov 24, 2015 1:34 pm

Self-signed certs are bad, mmmmkay?

For example, attackers can use the eDellRoot private key, which is now publicly available online, to generate certificates for any HTTPS-enabled websites. They can then use public wireless networks or hacked routers to decrypt traffic from affected Dell systems to those websites.

Edited By Malcolm on 1448390052