Digital Trends

dell's awful tech support and customer service

by richard on Jul 9th, 2008 at 8:50 AM:

I recently purchased a fully loaded Dell M1730 laptop SLI 8800GT graphics cards, 4 gigs of DDR (only 3GB can be used by vista 32bit and Dell does not offer 64 bit edition!)and so on. The laptop for the first few days was perfect, super fast performance and its all bundled into a great looking package however, there were numerous software conflicts etc. and what Dell does not tell you is that the great looking dell light FX system and windows vista SP1 have a known conflict and you will get a loud crackling noise through your soundcard while changing the lights and at the start of MP3 tracks and other situations ("Its a known conflict" according to Dell tech support, although during the 10+ phone calls I made to them no one had ever heard of this problem!)

Tech support with Dell is pretty awful and that's being very fair, my company currently has 4 Dell workstations and a Dell server and to be fair these machines have never had any issues but after my experience with Dell's tech support and being told there is nothing they can do about the light fx issue and even if I were to be given an exchange I would have the same problem.

I felt let down by Dell considering the machine had set me back over £2000 this didn't seem to matter to Dell and there were other issues but I didn't have the patience to go through the long winded tech support phone calls. Dell's media direct kept crashing without reason and it failed to play blu ray discs out of the box (I had to download powerdvd 8 to get those working!) there were other problems but the list was pretty long. To date and after a vast amount of infuriating phone calls to tech support I have been offered a full refund but I will be taking my business elsewhere in future, new buyers beware of Dell's lack of customer service