Another day and another Dell collection

Dell is one of those companies that has lots of good looking kit but manages to shoot itself in the foot when it comes to real quality.

We buy a lot of Dell PCs and have moved to using their EqualLogics kit for server storage. However their support in the UK is not the best organised. For example when the EQ hits a problem it will send an email home to Dell, the Euro support team in Ireland then contact me and ask for the logs, I generate them and have to send them to myself and forward them on to the support person despite the EQ sending the diagnostics to Dell as the support team in Ireland, for some reason not revealed to me, can’t easily access the diagnostics that EQ emails to Dell.

Having sorted out a replacement disk it is invariable delivered in a timely fashion but whoever comes and picks up the disk seems to be running a keystone cops type of affair. We have had to replace 4 disks recently and had about 10 phone calls to arrange pickups of various quantities of drives, once when I mentioned we had already arranged a pickup one lady even said that it was not the first time and someone wasn’t filling the spread sheet in properly, which doesn’t instil a lot of confidence. We had two drivers trying to collect one drive but were expecting two. Total madness.

Trying to get a laptop fixed I went on to the dell website and logged a call, the Laptop was showing signs of overheating on the graphics chip, I described the symptoms in the web form and went home, I expected contact the next day which was duly delivered in the form of could I run a bunch of diagnostics, yes but the chip took about an hour to overheat then the system was unusable, this information I sent off to the support person who then requested that I try up dating some drivers and Bios. After about 4 days of toing and froing I enquired as to when next business day turned in to next business week and could they just send an engineer out to fix the problem.

Apparently this was entirely my fault as I had contacted them from the website rather than using the pro support option, something that does not exist according to the Dell website, at least I was unable to find any mention of it on the Euro version of the site. This is phone support only and has to be set up first, there is also another option where you can just request parts without going through any support persons but you have to promise your first born to get that. Just to add further annoyance the phone number to contact Dell if you need help on the UK Pro Support site is 1-800-WWW-DELL which is a US number and won’t actually work from the UK, way to go Dell.

It would have been nice if our Account manager had set all this up way back when we started buying Dell kit as we buy around 300 PCs a year from them and have also bout 10 EqualLogics units you would have thought they would be keen to keep us sweet but the account managers are really pointless, every time we have ever tried to contact ours they have either changed or they just passed us off to someone else, they are not very helpful unless they think we might buy something, then they are all over us like a rash.