Thank You, Dell!

To my dear “don’t buy from Dell” friends…

My Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop retired from service last week. Working 15 hours a day, almost every day for 4 years, I was fortunate enough to experience the infamous Blue Screen of Death only twice. Once because of mother board failure and second time because of RAM module failure. Dell repaired the mother board in less than 24 hours on the first time. All I had to do was to give them a call and explain everything. Next morning, a geeky looking Dell technician showed up and fixed everything in less than 20 minutes. The only problem was that I had to wake up early in the morning. Second time was different. My three years warranty period was over and instead of ordering a RAM module from eBay, I did something else…

I received my new PCZILLA on St. Valentine’s day and the first thing I did was to check whether the spec were correct. There was only one problem. Vista said I had 3Gigs of RAM, but I ordered 4Gigs. So I called Dell. Took me about 5 minutes to be delivered to the right technician. Steve, I think (wasn’t his real name, though!). Anyway, it took us about 15 minutes to go through every single step that I had already done before the phone call, one more time. I even opened the case to make sure nothing was missing. Everything was fine. I was told that even though Vista says I’ve got 3Gigs, it actually is four! I Googled the problem later that day and it turned out that Vista 32bit does not recognise more than 3Gigs of RAM. I wasn’t really bothered because I paid for 2Gigs (half price RAM offer)! So I said to myself: fine!

Two days ago, I received an email from Dell: A feedback form regarding my service call. I was bored so I filled it up in detail and submitted it, thinking that nobody will ever bother to read it and it was just a automatically generated email. About three hours ago, I received a call from Dell. My issue “had been under investigation since my service call last week.” He also knew about the feedback! He did quote me from that form a couple of times (I’m glad I didn’t write anything silly)! Anyway… The guy said that the 32bit/64bit thing that I mentioned was correct and apologised for not finding it out on the first call. He offered me a refund for 1Gig of RAM and said somebody will come and get the module tomorrow morning… But then, when he checked the detail and found out about the half price memory offer, he changed his mind and said they can upgrade my vista to 64bit for free, instead. Of course, I had to give them the 1gig module in return. I asked him about driver and software compatibility issues in 64bit and he admitted that “it’s a bit buggy!” He also told me that Microsoft is working on a “hotfix.” So I refused the offer and said that I everything was fine and was happy to wait for the update.

Wooah, that was long! I’m out of brain dump so it’s up to you to decide whether Dell’s customer service rock or suck!