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The Bit Where The Saga With Dell Limps On…And On…

Posted By Claire On July 3, 2006 @ 9:14 pm In Toys | 13 Comments

First of all before I des­cend into a very typ­ic­ally Brit­ish “dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomer” rant, I would like to begin on a very pos­it­ive and appre­ci­at­ive note to acknow­ledge and thank all those that com­men­ted and offered help and advice on my last post.

All of your con­tri­bu­tions were heard and were received with frazzled gratitude.

Unfor­tu­nately, the afore-mentioned com­puter is still decidedly dead and I am still very much in the dark as to why. After play­ing a rather ridicu­lous game of “Cat and Mouse” with Dell’s Indian Call Centre tech­ni­tians via Email, Voice­mail and Tele­phone, I spent most of today try­ing to get through via their “Tech­nical Sup­port Helpline”.

I have lost count how many times I dialled that num­ber to then be greeted with not one, but three seper­ate press-option menus (that fol­low one after the other). After key­ing 1 for a “Home Sys­tem”, then 1 for “Dimen­sion”, then 2 for “pur­chases older than 30 days”, I was then greeted with ringing.…and more ringing…and then finally… the “Doooooooooh” of the ever-familiar dead dial tone as I got cut off. This happened Every. Mor­tal. Time.

I went through the online troubleshooter (thanks Karl) and did the “Drive Self Test” dia­gnostics doo-dah, which res­ul­ted in:

Hard Drive Diagnostics running, please wait...
Drive 0 - Error Attempting Diagnostics
Drive 1 - Sony CD-RW/DVD ROM CRX835E Diagnostics not supported

So, I told the troubleshooter and it then wanted me to rein­stall Windows.

I am not going down that road unsu­per­vised. The tech at my sister’s work­place recom­men­ded that I stick it out with Dell as I’m covered by war­ranty and would get parts and labour for free. But so far, all I’ve got­ten for free is a head­ache and a foul disposition.

The last time I tried the sup­port line, I actu­ally did man­age to get fur­ther than the options robot, though the robot was the only Eng­lish voice I was to hear through­out the dur­a­tion of the call. It is worth not­ing at this point that I am not good with for­eign accents.

I was marooned on “hold” for over 20 minutes listen­ing to a dodgy, budget Coun­try & West­ern com­pil­a­tion on a rough old cas­sette that by the sound (or lack of) it, had clearly seen bet­ter days. I was then greeted by a very Indian lady with a very Indian accent, whose name I obvi­ously didn’t catch.

Cue 45 mins of my life groan­ing by at an agon­ising pace as I spoon-fed said lady my con­tact details, spelling each ele­ment both phon­et­ic­ally and alpha­bet­ic­ally, com­plete with asso­ci­ated examples: “Essex, that’s eh-SSS-e-cksss, E for ele­phant, double S for sugar, another E for ele­phant and X for …*long pause whilst my train of thought flails around wildly for some­thing begin­ning with an X*…erm.. Xylo­phone!” and then plod­ding through diagnostics…

Oper­ator: “Please press the el-uff-dulleff key”

There’s me star­ing panic-stricken at my key­board, search­ing frantic­ally whilst think­ing to myself: But I don’t have an “Elf” key! It took sev­eral repe­ti­tions to dis­cover that she was actu­ally say­ing F12.

Long story short, my com­puter is being picked up and my hard drive is being replaced.

Lets hope the worst is over and that I get my com­puter back in one piece and in fully work­ing order.

P.S. The new bi-monthy header/masthead is now up. Be sure to refresh if you can’t see it. A new sec­tion that holds the old ones can be found here [1].
13 Comments (Open | Close)

13 Comments To "The Bit Where The Saga With Dell Limps On…And On…"

#1 Comment By Karl On July 4, 2006 @ 9:07 am

Ah! I’m glad you get the robot cut­ting you off as well…I thought that was just our IP phone system.

Always fun, is it not? As for the iffy hold music, I just turn on the speak­erphone and hurl abuse at the hor­ror until someone picks up. Keep a note­pad handy next time for doodling…it helps with the frustration.

It does sound like your HDD expired. There are a few brands that seem to be under fire at the moment. At least ours pre-empt fail­ure and bring up “Hard disk oper­at­ing out­side nor­mal para­met­ers. Please back up your data and replace drive. Press F1 to continue”.

Mind you, think­ing back..the 250Gb SATA drive in the CCTV machine expired after 3 months use and trashed about 80gb of data includ­ing the intranet/booking forms/SQL data­bases etc.

I guess the old say­ing of “It’ll either fail early, or run forever” still applies.

#2 Comment By Claire On July 4, 2006 @ 1:38 pm

Nope, don’t by any means feel priv­iledged, it seems they cut off every­one! :roll:

I guess the old say­ing of “It’ll either fail early, or run forever” still applies.

Ah, I’ll keep that in mind for future ref­er­ence… I’m just glad that I man­aged to get my docs and pho­tos backed up… Not so bothered about the progs/software as I have most of those on ori­ginal CD any­ways and those that I don’t are no big deal. Luck­ily, being on dial-up, I was never one for down­load­ing stacks of stuff any­way, so not too much will be lost. :)

#3 Comment By Elyse On July 4, 2006 @ 5:06 pm

I have an elf key. When you push it, an elf pops out and sings Brit­ney Spears’ songs. Avoid press­ing that key.

*cough*

I’m very sorry about your com­puter. If I were a magic fairy, I’d say POOF! and make it all bet­ter. But, I’m not, so you’ll just have to do with me leav­ing stu­pid com­ments on your blog that really serve no other pur­pose but to make you smile. And they suck at even that.

WOOT!

#4 Comment By Claire On July 4, 2006 @ 6:57 pm

I have an elf key. When you push it, an elf pops out and sings Brit­ney Spears’ songs.

…Must only be on US key­boards then… ‘sounds about right… :P

#5 Comment By Lew On July 5, 2006 @ 11:00 am

Huzzah for you! Hope all works out now.

BTW, I haven’t for­got­ten you tagged me a few posts back but my site is down (it’s com­plic­ated!) but it’s the first thing on my list when I get it back up.

#6 Comment By Meg­gan On July 8, 2006 @ 2:20 am

So sorry about the dead com­puter! :( I have a Dell desktop and haven’t had any prob­lems that weren’t already my own fault — it’s awful that yours died. I hope it gets sent back to you quickly with everything repaired. :D

#7 Comment By John On July 8, 2006 @ 3:09 am

My daugh­ter plopped her 5150 in front of me yes­ter­day even­ing. All the same symp­toms as you’ve exper­i­enced were doc­u­mented by her as well. Catch; they (Dell) had just installed a new mother­board about a month ago. 450USD spent on a machine that seems to be a POS! Odd though that I have 5 Dell machines and knock-knock, haven’t had one prob­lem as of yet. I will anxiously mon­itor your pro­gress with the Dell repair outlet.

#8 Comment By Claire On July 8, 2006 @ 5:01 pm

Meg­gan: Thanks — me too! Hope­fully I should have it returned to me in the next week.

John: Really? Maybe its a fault par­tic­u­lar to those machines?… I’ll keep you updated. I got a call from the Dell repair centre stat­ing that they’d replaced my HDD, so all my data has gone down the drain, but atleast I have back-ups. Fin­gers crossed that the new HDD will fix things.

#9 Comment By J On July 9, 2006 @ 3:37 pm

Heh oh noo! I have heard only hor­ror stor­ies of Dell. I thought the thickly accen­ted Indian call centre story was only an urban legend to scare little Cana­dian kid­dies into buy­ing more expens­ive laptops by unfriendly salespeople.

How­ever I myself bought an incred­ibly dodgy “Learning4Life” com­puter for my little brother once and dealt with sim­ilar phone sup­port exper­i­ences until the com­pany went down entirely and I had no sup­port. So basic­ally what I am ram­bling on about is: I can relate :)

#10 Comment By Claire On July 9, 2006 @ 3:46 pm

Ah no, myth and legend it is not. To quote Prince/ The Artist : “Everything you think is true”, I prom­ise ;)

#11 Comment By Karl On July 12, 2006 @ 11:26 am

John, you’re lucky. I’ve just been onto Dell Tech again today (argh). Of the 70 Opti­plex GX60’s we bought 18 months ago, I’ve now doc­u­mented 22 fail­ures! All power unit fail­ures bar one main­board going pop and one TFT expiring.

When I called and said I had 6 to log for PSU replacement(6 dead in 2 days!) , they had to “con­sult with super­visors” to check they could do 6 at once! They then had the bare­faced cheek to tell me that “We have no faults on our records for power units begin­ning “TH-0N2286-12782″.

Lies. 2 of their tech sup­ports who were on their last day have told me that it’s a “bad batch, and we’ve been told to replace them, no ques­tions asked. Dell won’t admit it though, it’s against com­pany policy. I’m only telling you because I’m leav­ing, so stuff them.”.

I’ve lost faith in Dell. We’re giv­ing major thought to threat­en­ing them with a detailed fail­ure report of our kit, straight onto our web­site and to our LEA, who are a major customer.

#12 Comment By Claire On July 12, 2006 @ 12:54 pm

Sounds like you’ve got a right saga going on there Karl. I hope you man­age to get it sorted!

My com­puter was returned to me on monday, com­plete with new HDD fit­ted, OS and drivers installed. *touches wood* things seem ok, its now just a mat­ter of rein­stalling all my soft­ware, mov­ing all my files over and tweak­ing things back to the way I like them.

Plus side is, the new HDD came with Norton Inter­net Secur­ity already installed on it, com­plete with a year’s free sub­scrip­tion to LiveUp­date :D (ori­ginal HDD didn’t).

So, that saves me from either buy­ing it or dig­ging out my old 2002 ver­sion. (Ver­sions after 2002 require you to register the key online, so you can’t use it for more than one machine (unless you buy a ver­sion with mul­tiple licences). Com­plete pain in the arse, really.)

#13 Comment By Robert On January 17, 2008 @ 5:24 pm

I too, am in Dell hell. I have a Dimen­sion E510 that won’t power up, the power light just flashes amber. The machine is only 18 months old. After read­ing all the hor­ror stor­ies about Dell tech sup­port, I will never call Dell. If I can’t fig­ure it out, it will give me great pleas­ure to smash it many times with a sledge ham­mer. Any­way, I did replace the power sup­ply, which resolved the prob­lem for a few minutes until I shut it down.. $ 65 bucks shot. If I unplug everything and open it up and wiggle all the con­nec­tions, I can usu­ally get it to power up. I have found that if I just leave the com­puter on, it’s fine. As far as I’m con­cerned, this Dell will now run forever, or until the next power failure.

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