Adventures in Tech Support with Dell

Dealing with Dell tech support is always entertaining and a royal pain in the ass. 

Last year I leased a Dell Vostro 1500. Since the day I got it, it would randomly crash. After having it a month or so I finallly called support, they ran a bunch of diagnostics and they  tell me I have to run the repair process on the operating system, and if that doesn’t fix the issue then I have to reinstall the OS.

Great.. so I back everything up, run the repair.. no dice.. still locks up randomly. Do the repair a couple more times and still having issues. SO I finally get around to reinstalling the OS this past January and my problem still isn’t fixed.

The one year anniversary for my Vostro 1500 just came up so I decided to contact support again and try and fix the issue. More diagnostic tests and nothing turns up. 15 minutes on hold and my knowledgable tech comes back and says lets reseat the hard drive and remove 1 GB of RAM to determine if one of these items fixes the problem.  

So I run the laptop for 36hrs on 1 of the 2GB of RAM and it seems fine n0 crashes. I call support and now I get the run around. Now they want me to swap RAM sticks which means I have to pull the keyboard and more. 

I kindly tell the  tech that “Unless you want to pay me my hourly rate of $60 an hour I am NOT removing the keyboard to swap out RAM”. More run-around I finally tell the tech.. “look, I’m obviously not getting anywhere with you so I’ll call back later.” 

An hour later the computer crashes.. go figure. 

Finally Friday morning I call support for the 5th time… give her the run down of the whole situation dating back to May of 2008  (because almost nothing is documented) and 45 minutes later.. I’m getting a new motherboard, hard drive and 2 new sticks of RAM.

Wouldn’t it just be easier & cheaper to give me a new computer?