As the family nerd, I am De facto tech support for my family and extended family. Dont get me wrong, I love helping family, but after working 50-60 hours a week in front of a computer I dont have a strong desire to spend more time working on computers, so about 12 years ago I adopted a policy that all family should buy Dell's. I found that the hardware and configurations they shipped were great, they were easy to setup (I think they were one of the first to color code the wired), and their tech support was great, whenever we called with a problem, they were very friendly and usually had the right answer quickly.
Fast forward 12 years later and I have had 2 bad experiences in the past year.
Bad Experience #1 - My Grandparents live in the middle of the desert in the state of Washington, most of our family lives on the east coast. We try to get out there 1 time a year to visit. My grandma is awesome, she can use the computer very well for someone that didn't grow up with computers, when her old e-machine died we decided to get her a Dell. I was out visiting and I removed the anitvirus that came with it, and put one I prefer and I installed some remoting software I use to get in and check things out every now and then. Everything was great but a few months later she had some problems, so I had her call tech support and I was on the phone. The person had a strong accent that my grandma could not understand, but I was able to translate the technical speak he was using for her and together we fixed the problem. A month later my grandma decided not to bother me and call Dell direct when she was having some problems again, this time they had her reinstall the whole operating system which wiped out everything I had setup previously. I think too often now tech supports answer to problems is just to wipe the machine, because they are sure they can do this in 30 minutes and get the user off the phone and save money.
Bad Experience #2 - My father in law just bought a new dell, he was able to set it up himself and get it working. He went to cnn.com and part of the site said he needed a flash player but there was no 64 bit version of a flash player. My father in law has no idea what 64 bit flash player is, he just wants cnn to work on his brand new computer. So he called tech support and he was asked if he would pay $200 to get the software support so they could give him the answer to his problem. So I did some googling and apparently the new version of vista you get with Dell is 64 bit and it comes with the 32 bit version of Internet Explorer and the 64 bit version of Internet Explorer. The default one that launches from the menu bar dell delivers seems to have recently moved to the 64 bit version even though there is no flash player. This is a simple 2 minute fix that Dell should be very aware of and be able to tell their customers in 5 seconds and not charge them $200 for.
So Dell, I am sad to say I give up on you for now, I still think you produce excellent hardware at a great price, but your support needs desperate help. Anyone else out there produce a good machine for a good price with excellent US support? Suggestions?
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