[nomoresecrets]

Yeah, Dell are great at support. </sarcasm>

My Dad's PC had a DVD-ROM drive that died. I was on the phone to Dell support for A WHOLE DAY. THe problem was trivial, but I got shunted around, told to try all the crappy shovelware shit they'd put on the PC that I'd uninstalled, etc.

XP's built-in CD burning just plain failed to work. Dell support tried to tell me that the CD-ROM drive was not compatible with XP's CD burning (totally nonsense). I even had to give them my credit card number to sign up for their software support (as well as the cash I'd paid for next-day hardware support), because "it might be a software problem, so you have to pay for software support." At least they had the decency to refund that.

They'd established (or rather, I had) that the drive was faulty, so they wanted to mail me a drive and I could fit it. As I'd paid for next-day on-site warranty I told them they could take a running jump.

Next day, hardware guy turns up, replaces drive in about 10 minutes, fixing the problem.

A WHOLE DAY on the phone. I've never bought Dell support again.

[tallanvor]

Consumer level support is completely different than enterprise support. --Generally with enterprise support, companies like Dell assume someone competent has already done initial troubleshooting. It's cheaper for them to pay people to spend the day on phone rather than sending someone onsite for something that might not actually be a hardware issue.

I'm not saying it's right, that's just the way it works, unfortunately.