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Needless to say, this post is bound to conflict with the glowing reports of Dell, so be warned – this is not a happy story…
Back in the olden days, I had a mere Pentium60, and, despite it’s occasional crashing, it could be depended upon, could be trusted to do the job right, but as times move on, I managed to set aside enough money to buy a whole new system – I wanted a PC with style, processing power to make AMD’s cry, and the assurance that it would be reliable, oh yeah, and a reasonable price tag. So, after an NTL referred email suggesting I look at the Dell PC range, via a link in the mail, I discovered a range of PCs, starting at an approachable price figure. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I chose the Dell ‘Dimension L800r’ which weighed in at under £660. For this I got a 20gb hard drive, 64mb RAM, a standard CD drive and a Pentium 3 800mhz processor – as well as the basic monitor and keyboard et al.
Let me warn you though, you may find my post to be of some use to you, but, as you will notice later on in the opinion, my ‘case’ was very rare indeed. I fell so pleased that I’m special…Right, here’s the deal, after paying for the computer, which included a 1yr onsite warranty I’d been very impressed with the machine in general. It may have taken a while to actually arrive – Dell use IEC, a very competent shipping company who only send next day, and not on weekends (so basically you have to have someone in your house on the day you arrange for them to deliver), but as I say, there were no problems with the shipping and delivery, which, incidentally, is free. Unravelling the two huge boxes I found all the parts, excellently packaged I might add. Setting up was straight forward enough, and within a couple of hours I was writing my reviews for dooyoo.co.uk – and almost made my target of 50 crowns, but then didn’t, and so I haven’t really done anything at the site since.
Aesthetically, the Dell is excellent – a very compact CPU, with a fantastic opening side panel to allow for easy ‘looking around’ at all the insides… The screen is a 15inch very smoothly designed ergonomically sound piece of kit, but of course when ordering you can change the size of screen at a price. The keyboard is supposedly a ‘quiet sound’ Dell keyboard, but I can hear me type as I listen to my MP3 player! Microsoft mouse - 3 button standard. You can select various programs and software at an extra cost, but all the PC’s in the range arrive complete with the latest Windows program to get you started, oh and Norton Anti Virus is also included – an essential piece of software. So, in general I was pleased with the appearance and ease of use of the computer (up until the point of it not working).
This is where the story turns sour. Just a month of use, I was writing something or other, and left the computer for a few minutes, only to come back to a flickering screen with only the mouse pointer showing. Hmm, this wasn’t a great sign, so trying everything in my power (basic understanding of computers); I didn’t manage to get the desktop screen back so restarting was the only option. Waiting for ages for the computer to reload, I was greeted by an ‘Invalid Boot disk’ message and a ‘Please insert boot diskette into drive A:’ – excellent. This wasn’t a great sign, and after numerous attempts to get the screen to go back to windows, err, well it didn’t work. Time to call Dell. Oh dear.
Recently in the news there have been reports and information about Dell losing a lot of money and ‘laying off’ a lot of staff (in the thousands), so something must be going wrong at the Irish firm – maybe they’ve become to big to be managed properly. If you ever experience problems with your Dell PC or have any queries about the company then I do not recommend sending an email to them. Disregard the automated voice -they don’t reply to your emails, well, they didn’t reply to any of mine. So phoning them is the only way, and the most expensive unfortunately. Here’s some advice – gather a few friends round your house if you ever attempt to contact via the telephone so you can take shifts. They take that long. If automated voices, and strange music are your thing, and you like wasting money – then call this number now ‘0… but seriously, it’s a disgrace.
Finally I got through to someone and explained the situation, so they did a BIOS check – talking on the phone to me whilst I explained what was happening, so they could tell me the same instructions around 5 times, and so I could explain that it didn’t work every time. Very useful stuff indeed! After a rather long and tiring conversation I was told that it was probably the hard drive at fault – someone would have to come round and give my new Dell a check-up. Being the person that I am, I presumed they would arrive on the day that was arranged, but obviously I didn’t allow for any computer errors, and didn’t appreciate that the service call request may have been requested too late and slipped off the records. Re-arranging was the problem, but finally after several-hundred phone calls, & two weeks later, Dell didn’t arrive on the correct day. This time they turned up a day early, when nobody was in. Thankfully I managed to re-arrange the date to the day after the date that they were supposed to arrive, and they did.
At last, a glimmer of hope shone in my eyes – I could almost picture myself typing endlessly for hours on end about products and services and… well, the Dell person described the hard drive as ‘dead as a dodo’ and that sometimes ‘these things happen’, but that it was a very rare occurrence. He took around an hour to change the hard drive with a new identical drive (except this one works) as well as re-installing all the software in the package. I couldn’t really believe that all my files & all my reviews and documents had been lost! Destroyed and completely unrecoverable! Never mind, we can always start again.
I hope that this kind of service and attitude from Dell (they get the date wrong, have an awful customer service system) will never be experienced by anyone else. To call my experience as inconvenient is somewhat of an understatement. Even arranging shipping and delivery was pretty tiresome, but this wasn’t what I expected. It’s bad enough having all your files and software deleted and hard drive give up on you, yet alone be treated to appalling customer service.
The computer is working fine now, as it should do, and hopefully I’ll not have any more problems with it. As for the score for Dell…it was well priced, but piece/peace of mind obviously wasn’t included. Maybe they should offer this as a no cost option.
Overall, I’ve been disappointed and have been left with a cold & dark regard of Dell. I should have looked past the price, and gone for an SR PC with all the extras at just a couple of hundred more - I'd have had a CDR, DVD drive and most importantly piece of mind.
Oh well, at least it's working well enough for me to warn you about it!
Dan2K1
Back in the olden days, I had a mere Pentium60, and, despite it’s occasional crashing, it could be depended upon, could be trusted to do the job right, but as times move on, I managed to set aside enough money to buy a whole new system – I wanted a PC with style, processing power to make AMD’s cry, and the assurance that it would be reliable, oh yeah, and a reasonable price tag. So, after an NTL referred email suggesting I look at the Dell PC range, via a link in the mail, I discovered a range of PCs, starting at an approachable price figure. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I chose the Dell ‘Dimension L800r’ which weighed in at under £660. For this I got a 20gb hard drive, 64mb RAM, a standard CD drive and a Pentium 3 800mhz processor – as well as the basic monitor and keyboard et al.
Let me warn you though, you may find my post to be of some use to you, but, as you will notice later on in the opinion, my ‘case’ was very rare indeed. I fell so pleased that I’m special…Right, here’s the deal, after paying for the computer, which included a 1yr onsite warranty I’d been very impressed with the machine in general. It may have taken a while to actually arrive – Dell use IEC, a very competent shipping company who only send next day, and not on weekends (so basically you have to have someone in your house on the day you arrange for them to deliver), but as I say, there were no problems with the shipping and delivery, which, incidentally, is free. Unravelling the two huge boxes I found all the parts, excellently packaged I might add. Setting up was straight forward enough, and within a couple of hours I was writing my reviews for dooyoo.co.uk – and almost made my target of 50 crowns, but then didn’t, and so I haven’t really done anything at the site since.
Aesthetically, the Dell is excellent – a very compact CPU, with a fantastic opening side panel to allow for easy ‘looking around’ at all the insides… The screen is a 15inch very smoothly designed ergonomically sound piece of kit, but of course when ordering you can change the size of screen at a price. The keyboard is supposedly a ‘quiet sound’ Dell keyboard, but I can hear me type as I listen to my MP3 player! Microsoft mouse - 3 button standard. You can select various programs and software at an extra cost, but all the PC’s in the range arrive complete with the latest Windows program to get you started, oh and Norton Anti Virus is also included – an essential piece of software. So, in general I was pleased with the appearance and ease of use of the computer (up until the point of it not working).
This is where the story turns sour. Just a month of use, I was writing something or other, and left the computer for a few minutes, only to come back to a flickering screen with only the mouse pointer showing. Hmm, this wasn’t a great sign, so trying everything in my power (basic understanding of computers); I didn’t manage to get the desktop screen back so restarting was the only option. Waiting for ages for the computer to reload, I was greeted by an ‘Invalid Boot disk’ message and a ‘Please insert boot diskette into drive A:’ – excellent. This wasn’t a great sign, and after numerous attempts to get the screen to go back to windows, err, well it didn’t work. Time to call Dell. Oh dear.
Recently in the news there have been reports and information about Dell losing a lot of money and ‘laying off’ a lot of staff (in the thousands), so something must be going wrong at the Irish firm – maybe they’ve become to big to be managed properly. If you ever experience problems with your Dell PC or have any queries about the company then I do not recommend sending an email to them. Disregard the automated voice -they don’t reply to your emails, well, they didn’t reply to any of mine. So phoning them is the only way, and the most expensive unfortunately. Here’s some advice – gather a few friends round your house if you ever attempt to contact via the telephone so you can take shifts. They take that long. If automated voices, and strange music are your thing, and you like wasting money – then call this number now ‘0… but seriously, it’s a disgrace.
Finally I got through to someone and explained the situation, so they did a BIOS check – talking on the phone to me whilst I explained what was happening, so they could tell me the same instructions around 5 times, and so I could explain that it didn’t work every time. Very useful stuff indeed! After a rather long and tiring conversation I was told that it was probably the hard drive at fault – someone would have to come round and give my new Dell a check-up. Being the person that I am, I presumed they would arrive on the day that was arranged, but obviously I didn’t allow for any computer errors, and didn’t appreciate that the service call request may have been requested too late and slipped off the records. Re-arranging was the problem, but finally after several-hundred phone calls, & two weeks later, Dell didn’t arrive on the correct day. This time they turned up a day early, when nobody was in. Thankfully I managed to re-arrange the date to the day after the date that they were supposed to arrive, and they did.
At last, a glimmer of hope shone in my eyes – I could almost picture myself typing endlessly for hours on end about products and services and… well, the Dell person described the hard drive as ‘dead as a dodo’ and that sometimes ‘these things happen’, but that it was a very rare occurrence. He took around an hour to change the hard drive with a new identical drive (except this one works) as well as re-installing all the software in the package. I couldn’t really believe that all my files & all my reviews and documents had been lost! Destroyed and completely unrecoverable! Never mind, we can always start again.
I hope that this kind of service and attitude from Dell (they get the date wrong, have an awful customer service system) will never be experienced by anyone else. To call my experience as inconvenient is somewhat of an understatement. Even arranging shipping and delivery was pretty tiresome, but this wasn’t what I expected. It’s bad enough having all your files and software deleted and hard drive give up on you, yet alone be treated to appalling customer service.
The computer is working fine now, as it should do, and hopefully I’ll not have any more problems with it. As for the score for Dell…it was well priced, but piece/peace of mind obviously wasn’t included. Maybe they should offer this as a no cost option.
Overall, I’ve been disappointed and have been left with a cold & dark regard of Dell. I should have looked past the price, and gone for an SR PC with all the extras at just a couple of hundred more - I'd have had a CDR, DVD drive and most importantly piece of mind.
Oh well, at least it's working well enough for me to warn you about it!
Dan2K1
There have been no replies to this thread yet.
Needless to say, this post is bound to conflict with the glowing reports of Dell, so be warned – this is not a happy story…
Back in the olden days, I had a mere Pentium60, and, despite it’s occasional crashing, it could be depended upon, could be trusted to do the job right, but as times move on, I managed to set aside enough money to buy a whole new system – I wanted a PC with style, processing power to make AMD’s cry, and the assurance that it would be reliable, oh yeah, and a reasonable price tag. So, after an NTL referred email suggesting I look at the Dell PC range, via a link in the mail, I discovered a range of PCs, starting at an approachable price figure. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I chose the Dell ‘Dimension L800r’ which weighed in at under £660. For this I got a 20gb hard drive, 64mb RAM, a standard CD drive and a Pentium 3 800mhz processor – as well as the basic monitor and keyboard et al.
Let me warn you though, you may find my post to be of some use to you, but, as you will notice later on in the opinion, my ‘case’ was very rare indeed. I fell so pleased that I’m special…Right, here’s the deal, after paying for the computer, which included a 1yr onsite warranty I’d been very impressed with the machine in general. It may have taken a while to actually arrive – Dell use IEC, a very competent shipping company who only send next day, and not on weekends (so basically you have to have someone in your house on the day you arrange for them to deliver), but as I say, there were no problems with the shipping and delivery, which, incidentally, is free. Unravelling the two huge boxes I found all the parts, excellently packaged I might add. Setting up was straight forward enough, and within a couple of hours I was writing my reviews for dooyoo.co.uk – and almost made my target of 50 crowns, but then didn’t, and so I haven’t really done anything at the site since.
Aesthetically, the Dell is excellent – a very compact CPU, with a fantastic opening side panel to allow for easy ‘looking around’ at all the insides… The screen is a 15inch very smoothly designed ergonomically sound piece of kit, but of course when ordering you can change the size of screen at a price. The keyboard is supposedly a ‘quiet sound’ Dell keyboard, but I can hear me type as I listen to my MP3 player! Microsoft mouse - 3 button standard. You can select various programs and software at an extra cost, but all the PC’s in the range arrive complete with the latest Windows program to get you started, oh and Norton Anti Virus is also included – an essential piece of software. So, in general I was pleased with the appearance and ease of use of the computer (up until the point of it not working).
This is where the story turns sour. Just a month of use, I was writing something or other, and left the computer for a few minutes, only to come back to a flickering screen with only the mouse pointer showing. Hmm, this wasn’t a great sign, so trying everything in my power (basic understanding of computers); I didn’t manage to get the desktop screen back so restarting was the only option. Waiting for ages for the computer to reload, I was greeted by an ‘Invalid Boot disk’ message and a ‘Please insert boot diskette into drive A:’ – excellent. This wasn’t a great sign, and after numerous attempts to get the screen to go back to windows, err, well it didn’t work. Time to call Dell. Oh dear.
Recently in the news there have been reports and information about Dell losing a lot of money and ‘laying off’ a lot of staff (in the thousands), so something must be going wrong at the Irish firm – maybe they’ve become to big to be managed properly. If you ever experience problems with your Dell PC or have any queries about the company then I do not recommend sending an email to them. Disregard the automated voice -they don’t reply to your emails, well, they didn’t reply to any of mine. So phoning them is the only way, and the most expensive unfortunately. Here’s some advice – gather a few friends round your house if you ever attempt to contact via the telephone so you can take shifts. They take that long. If automated voices, and strange music are your thing, and you like wasting money – then call this number now ‘0… but seriously, it’s a disgrace.
Finally I got through to someone and explained the situation, so they did a BIOS check – talking on the phone to me whilst I explained what was happening, so they could tell me the same instructions around 5 times, and so I could explain that it didn’t work every time. Very useful stuff indeed! After a rather long and tiring conversation I was told that it was probably the hard drive at fault – someone would have to come round and give my new Dell a check-up. Being the person that I am, I presumed they would arrive on the day that was arranged, but obviously I didn’t allow for any computer errors, and didn’t appreciate that the service call request may have been requested too late and slipped off the records. Re-arranging was the problem, but finally after several-hundred phone calls, & two weeks later, Dell didn’t arrive on the correct day. This time they turned up a day early, when nobody was in. Thankfully I managed to re-arrange the date to the day after the date that they were supposed to arrive, and they did.
At last, a glimmer of hope shone in my eyes – I could almost picture myself typing endlessly for hours on end about products and services and… well, the Dell person described the hard drive as ‘dead as a dodo’ and that sometimes ‘these things happen’, but that it was a very rare occurrence. He took around an hour to change the hard drive with a new identical drive (except this one works) as well as re-installing all the software in the package. I couldn’t really believe that all my files & all my reviews and documents had been lost! Destroyed and completely unrecoverable! Never mind, we can always start again.
I hope that this kind of service and attitude from Dell (they get the date wrong, have an awful customer service system) will never be experienced by anyone else. To call my experience as inconvenient is somewhat of an understatement. Even arranging shipping and delivery was pretty tiresome, but this wasn’t what I expected. It’s bad enough having all your files and software deleted and hard drive give up on you, yet alone be treated to appalling customer service.
The computer is working fine now, as it should do, and hopefully I’ll not have any more problems with it. As for the score for Dell…it was well priced, but piece/peace of mind obviously wasn’t included. Maybe they should offer this as a no cost option.
Overall, I’ve been disappointed and have been left with a cold & dark regard of Dell. I should have looked past the price, and gone for an SR PC with all the extras at just a couple of hundred more - I'd have had a CDR, DVD drive and most importantly piece of mind.
Oh well, at least it's working well enough for me to warn you about it!
Dan2K1
Back in the olden days, I had a mere Pentium60, and, despite it’s occasional crashing, it could be depended upon, could be trusted to do the job right, but as times move on, I managed to set aside enough money to buy a whole new system – I wanted a PC with style, processing power to make AMD’s cry, and the assurance that it would be reliable, oh yeah, and a reasonable price tag. So, after an NTL referred email suggesting I look at the Dell PC range, via a link in the mail, I discovered a range of PCs, starting at an approachable price figure. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I chose the Dell ‘Dimension L800r’ which weighed in at under £660. For this I got a 20gb hard drive, 64mb RAM, a standard CD drive and a Pentium 3 800mhz processor – as well as the basic monitor and keyboard et al.
Let me warn you though, you may find my post to be of some use to you, but, as you will notice later on in the opinion, my ‘case’ was very rare indeed. I fell so pleased that I’m special…Right, here’s the deal, after paying for the computer, which included a 1yr onsite warranty I’d been very impressed with the machine in general. It may have taken a while to actually arrive – Dell use IEC, a very competent shipping company who only send next day, and not on weekends (so basically you have to have someone in your house on the day you arrange for them to deliver), but as I say, there were no problems with the shipping and delivery, which, incidentally, is free. Unravelling the two huge boxes I found all the parts, excellently packaged I might add. Setting up was straight forward enough, and within a couple of hours I was writing my reviews for dooyoo.co.uk – and almost made my target of 50 crowns, but then didn’t, and so I haven’t really done anything at the site since.
Aesthetically, the Dell is excellent – a very compact CPU, with a fantastic opening side panel to allow for easy ‘looking around’ at all the insides… The screen is a 15inch very smoothly designed ergonomically sound piece of kit, but of course when ordering you can change the size of screen at a price. The keyboard is supposedly a ‘quiet sound’ Dell keyboard, but I can hear me type as I listen to my MP3 player! Microsoft mouse - 3 button standard. You can select various programs and software at an extra cost, but all the PC’s in the range arrive complete with the latest Windows program to get you started, oh and Norton Anti Virus is also included – an essential piece of software. So, in general I was pleased with the appearance and ease of use of the computer (up until the point of it not working).
This is where the story turns sour. Just a month of use, I was writing something or other, and left the computer for a few minutes, only to come back to a flickering screen with only the mouse pointer showing. Hmm, this wasn’t a great sign, so trying everything in my power (basic understanding of computers); I didn’t manage to get the desktop screen back so restarting was the only option. Waiting for ages for the computer to reload, I was greeted by an ‘Invalid Boot disk’ message and a ‘Please insert boot diskette into drive A:’ – excellent. This wasn’t a great sign, and after numerous attempts to get the screen to go back to windows, err, well it didn’t work. Time to call Dell. Oh dear.
Recently in the news there have been reports and information about Dell losing a lot of money and ‘laying off’ a lot of staff (in the thousands), so something must be going wrong at the Irish firm – maybe they’ve become to big to be managed properly. If you ever experience problems with your Dell PC or have any queries about the company then I do not recommend sending an email to them. Disregard the automated voice -they don’t reply to your emails, well, they didn’t reply to any of mine. So phoning them is the only way, and the most expensive unfortunately. Here’s some advice – gather a few friends round your house if you ever attempt to contact via the telephone so you can take shifts. They take that long. If automated voices, and strange music are your thing, and you like wasting money – then call this number now ‘0… but seriously, it’s a disgrace.
Finally I got through to someone and explained the situation, so they did a BIOS check – talking on the phone to me whilst I explained what was happening, so they could tell me the same instructions around 5 times, and so I could explain that it didn’t work every time. Very useful stuff indeed! After a rather long and tiring conversation I was told that it was probably the hard drive at fault – someone would have to come round and give my new Dell a check-up. Being the person that I am, I presumed they would arrive on the day that was arranged, but obviously I didn’t allow for any computer errors, and didn’t appreciate that the service call request may have been requested too late and slipped off the records. Re-arranging was the problem, but finally after several-hundred phone calls, & two weeks later, Dell didn’t arrive on the correct day. This time they turned up a day early, when nobody was in. Thankfully I managed to re-arrange the date to the day after the date that they were supposed to arrive, and they did.
At last, a glimmer of hope shone in my eyes – I could almost picture myself typing endlessly for hours on end about products and services and… well, the Dell person described the hard drive as ‘dead as a dodo’ and that sometimes ‘these things happen’, but that it was a very rare occurrence. He took around an hour to change the hard drive with a new identical drive (except this one works) as well as re-installing all the software in the package. I couldn’t really believe that all my files & all my reviews and documents had been lost! Destroyed and completely unrecoverable! Never mind, we can always start again.
I hope that this kind of service and attitude from Dell (they get the date wrong, have an awful customer service system) will never be experienced by anyone else. To call my experience as inconvenient is somewhat of an understatement. Even arranging shipping and delivery was pretty tiresome, but this wasn’t what I expected. It’s bad enough having all your files and software deleted and hard drive give up on you, yet alone be treated to appalling customer service.
The computer is working fine now, as it should do, and hopefully I’ll not have any more problems with it. As for the score for Dell…it was well priced, but piece/peace of mind obviously wasn’t included. Maybe they should offer this as a no cost option.
Overall, I’ve been disappointed and have been left with a cold & dark regard of Dell. I should have looked past the price, and gone for an SR PC with all the extras at just a couple of hundred more - I'd have had a CDR, DVD drive and most importantly piece of mind.
Oh well, at least it's working well enough for me to warn you about it!
Dan2K1